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Migrating from Wordpress

What is Wordpress?

Wordpress is the world wide most used Content Management System (CMS). It allows both developers and non-developers to build blogs, portfolios and other simple websites. Its main advantage is that you don't need programming skills and you can quickly build a website from thousands of available themes and plugins.

Why migrate from Wordpress?

When your business (and your website) evolves, you may end up with many plugins and extensions installed on your Wordpress. Your site may become slower and slower, overall performances may decrease considerably, even adding more plugins to fix, extend, secure or improve stuff won't help anymore. Visits won't pick up as expected, mainly due to poor performances.

Having so many plugins is also a potential increase in security leaks. Wordpress being the most popular CMS is certainly the most attacked too.

Administration panel is becoming complicated and it's getting harder to find and manage your content. It's very frustrating to loose time on searching where this block of content comes from.

If this is your situation, it may be time to move on a more advanced solution.

Where to migrate to?

It all depends on your needs, planned evolutions and budget. There are no generic answers to this. Below are three of many options that could be done:

  • Advanced CMS: Remains simple, easy to use, affordable, more efficient and more customizable than a Wordpress. In that case, we usually go for OctoberCMS, a robust Laravel based software.
  • Headless CMS: Headless CMS simply means a CMS without its front end (the theme part). This solution is great when using Javascript frameworks like ReactJS, VueJS... and mobile applications. We would recommend Strapi, an emerging brillant solution made with NodeJS, or as mentioned above, OctoberCMS (by disabling its theme module).
  • Build from scratch: We would choose this option if you need very special features that a CMS won't be able to provide. Building from scratch requires a higher budget, but will ensure full scalability and high performances. Using well known frameworks like Laravel (PHP) or ExpressJS (NodeJS) would be a good start base.

In terms of front-end technologies, you can keep a standard and affordable HTML5/CSS. However, to empower user experience, we would go for a popular Javascript framework like ReactJS.

Again, it all depends on budget and application needs.

How to migrate ?

Project planning

Migration must be done smoothly. Proper project planning must be done to prevent downtime or data losses.

Migration Scripts

If you have a lot of content, you may need to develop migration scripts to automatically import older posts and other data into the new solution, saving you hours of work! If you have fast changing content, like for an e-commerce or a forum, scripts become highly recommended.

SEO

Links from older sites must be redirected to new ones and with correct code (301 Moved Permanently). This will keep past marketing links working but also let crawlers and bots update your sitemap.

Conclusion

If you feel it's time to migrate from Wordpress, take your time to choose the right technology. Before migrating, ensure the chosen solution is the right one and can evolve with your business needs. Correct project planning is the key to a successful migration in order to prevent any unnecessary downtime.