CMS Migration

For new businesses looking to do things fast and cheap, Squarespace can be a great option. But it has a lifespan; it’s a good stop-gap measure to get an online presence, but as a business’ requirements become more complex (and they do become more complex), there’s often a realisation that a more flexible CMS is going to be needed. And CMS ‘flexibility’ is typically associated with WordPress.

When we migrate a Squarespace website to WordPress we’ll normally start by crawling the Squarespace website to get an understanding of the website’s structure, and what content resides where. Among other things this helps avoid 404s at the end of the migration process. And 404s if you’re wondering, have been the undoing of many a business during a CMS migration as they cause dramatic SEO ranking drops.

Creating an instance of WordPress follows with all the files and database on our staging server. We’ll either create a new theme or replicate the styling on your existing Squarespace website. All going well we can get in to exporting the data. Unfortunately Squarespace has some pretty limited exporting functionality so we do quite often have to resort to the good ole ‘copy paste method’. Inefficient and laborious, but the only way sometimes.

At the end of a Squarespace to WordPress migration we run a range of quality checks to ensure any 404s are eliminated, as well as general cross-browser and cross-device testing and styling checks.

There are a few reasons why you may want to migrate your online store from Shopify to WooCommerce. A lot of the time it’s simply because Shopify can become too pricey; the more you items you sell, the more you pay in transaction fees, and the monthly fees for your shop can also increase at the same time. As business’ develop they tend to want to hang on to their hard earned money..

If cost isn’t the direct issue then you might just want to develop an online store that is integrated with your WordPress site or are looking at moving your actual site to WordPress. Running a Shopify store alongside a WordPress website (or any other CMS for that matter) can cause undue complications. Among many other things it means updating 2 websites and requiring proficiency in 2 different CMS’. Which is a real pain, and in practical terms when enthusiasm to update and edit websites becomes a ‘pain’, the business suffers. If your web development partner or in-house website managers aren’t equipped to work efficiently in 2 different CMS’, then consolidation may well be the best option. It costs money to do the migration, but the long-term savings  and efficiencies gained invariably are significant.

Once your online store is running on WooCommerce, you’re in the best of hands. The same community of web developers behind WordPress are behind WooCommerce.

Migrating from SilverStripe to WordPress can be a great option for businesses seeking lower running costs and increased flexibility from their website. The SilverStripe CMS is superb, but is a niche CMS with only a relatively very small community around it. Many new entrants overlook this fact when deciding on their first website’s CMS choice, but the size of the community and support will play a major role in how easy it is build on your website’s functionality. As well as the cost of doing so.

Migrating from SiverStripe to WordPress can be done whilst your existing SilverStripe website stays live. Before we begin we use software to crawl the existing website and collect all of its URLs. Doing so helps us understand the website’s architecture and maintain your valuable links for SEO preservation.

Shortly after we setup a separate WordPress instance for your new website and begin work on either replicating your existing theme, or building you a brand new theme.

Once the SilverStripe to WordPress migration process is complete in its staging environment we run more software to find any 404s, and resolve them with ‘rewrite rules’.

If you’re interested in migrating your SilverStripe website to WordPress (or your WordPress website to SilverStripe, for that matter), feel free to get in touch. We’ve migrated many SilverStripe and WordPress websites – big and small – and are happy to talk about yours.