Adventure-travel booking store upgraded with full data migration

The challenge

A UK company that runs mountaineering and adventure challenges sold its trips through an online store that had fallen well behind. It ran an old OpenCart release on PHP 5.x, a version no longer fit for a modern server, and the business could not simply reinstall: years of customers, orders and product data, a purchased theme and a deposit-based checkout all had to survive the move.

The owner needed the store brought up to the latest release without losing data, without changing the look customers knew, and with minimal disruption to bookings.

What we did

• Staged upgrade. Because the live server was still on PHP 5.x, we built the upgraded store on our own staging server first. That let the client review a working demo before anything changed on the live site.
• Full data migration. We moved customers, orders, products, categories, manufacturers, store settings, payment and shipping methods and banners into the new release, and set the store currency to GBP.
• Design retained. The existing theme design was carried over, so the upgraded store looked the same to returning customers.
• Deposit checkout. We installed the advanced version of our partial-payment module on the new store, so customers could continue to pay a deposit when booking a trip.
• Go-live. Once the client approved the demo, the server's PHP version was switched and the new store went live, with the old files kept in a separate folder as a fallback.
• SEO and advertising fixes. After launch we restored the missing rewrite rules and SEO-friendly URLs that had caused the client's Google Ads to be disabled, added product SEO keywords and repaired broken featured and category links.

Tech stack

PHP 7.3+, MySQL, OpenCart, cPanel, GSP partial-payment module