All Things Beauty Gets a Makeover

It's been a busy Sunday in our house, and for once it wasn't me fixing someone else's computer, it was a job a little closer to home!

If you didn't already know, my wife Angela runs All Things Beauty, a blog and eBay shop full of luxury skincare, makeup, fragrance & haircare. The blog has lived on GoDaddy for years, and in all honesty it had started to look a bit tired, a bit fiddly to update, and of course GoDaddy kept sending the renewal bills. So the plan was simple, in my mind at least? Move everything over to Wix, give it a proper makeover, and don't lose a single post along the way.

So lets go back to the beginning. Angela has 97 blog posts going back years, every one with photos, and GoDaddy doesn't exactly make it easy to take your content elsewhere. There's no handy export button, so we pulled every post out ourselves, packaged them up into a file Wix could understand, and pressed import. Job done?

Not quite! All 97 posts arrived, titles, text, dates, the lot, but not a single photo. It turned out the image links on the old site were written in a slightly odd way that Wix simply ignored. A quick fix to the file, the photo-less posts into the bin, a second import, and there they all were, pictures and all. If only I'd spotted that in the first place 🤦🏻‍♂️

Then on to the fun part, the rebrand! Angela wanted something that felt like her products, so the new site has a soft luxe look, warm blush pinks, deep plum and a touch of gold, with elegant serif headings. The home page now has a big Shop feature that takes you straight to her eBay store, and the stock photos that used to scroll along the bottom have been swapped for her live Instagram feed, so it updates itself every time she posts.

The About page got some love too, with a proper photo of Angela and a strip of products alongside her story. She had a few notes along the way, of course. The first font "looked too much like email" (fair point!), the shop heading had a big gap under it, and the featured image on the home page was a bit blurry. All sorted. And when she checked it on her phone this afternoon the menu had wrapped onto two lines and the contact page text was sat on top of the form, so mobile now has a tidy hamburger menu and a layout that fits.

Next came the bit nobody sees, but it's the bit that matters most. GoDaddy, in their wisdom, charged us for another month on Friday, so after an online chat and a refund, we took the domain's name servers and pointed them at Wix. We also picked up allthingsbeauty.uk to go alongside the .co.uk, and it now points to the same site. allthingsbeauty.co.uk/store now goes straight to the eBay shop too, which is a lot easier to say out loud!

The big worry with any move is broken links. Years of Google results and links shared on social media all point at the old web addresses, and Wix names its pages differently. So we set up 100 redirects, one for every old blog post plus the About and Contact pages, meaning anyone following an old link lands on the right page rather than an error. Then we connected Google Search Console (Google's tool for showing how your site appears in search), sent it the new sitemap, and worked through the Wix SEO checklist, page titles, descriptions, image alt text and the lot.

So there we have it, a fresh new home for All Things Beauty, all 97 posts safe and sound, and not one old link left behind. Angela is already planning her next posts, and with Christmas just around the corner I suspect there'll be a gift guide or two very very soon…….

Go and have a look at allthingsbeauty.co.uk and let us know your thoughts? And if your own website is stuck somewhere you'd rather it wasn't, as always we can help you move it, contact us today.