On the Web: The 4 Catastrophic Mistakes of Any 
E-Commerce Website Upgrade

6. no cross-sell/upsell opportunities on product pages or in the shopping cart; and

7. a lengthy checkout process.

Just to name a few …

In the day-to-day mire of an upgrade, it's easy to lose sight of e-commerce best practices. Stay focused on the buy/flow process and make it easy for your customers to find and purchase the items they're looking for.

Mistake 4: 
Losing Focus on SEO
The last thing you want to do is watch your traffic, search engine rankings and sales take a dive when you relaunch your new site. Yet this happens often when companies spend all their energy on the latest e-commerce bells and whistles and lose focus on the important task of maintaining the traffic needed to grow online sales.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is key to your e-commerce success, and the rules change almost weekly. Keep this top of mind throughout your entire upgrade process.

Follow these steps to avoid an SEO meltdown:

● Search engine spiders can't read Flash or JavaScript very efficiently. You don't have to avoid these altogether — just make sure your homepage includes plenty of navigational links that will take the spiders deeper into the site.

● If you have content that already ranks well, use the same URLs in your new site. If not, it's imperative to use 301 redirects. These are the most efficient and SEO-friendly method for web page redirection.

● Don't lose focus on the things that built your rankings to begin with: keywords, content, title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, URLs, etc.

● Don't forget to map existing traffic to your new site. This can easily get lost in the last-minute shuffle.

Website upgrades are part of selling successfully in the online world. It takes a lot of time and energy, but the rewards can be huge if you avoid these mistakes outlined above.