What do I need to think about when migrating my site to WordPress?

Exygy’s CEO, Zach Berke, answers that question in this video:

Video Notes:

What does “migrate” or “move to WordPress” mean to you?

Adding the WordPress CMS to your existing website

At the simplest: put WordPress under the hood, but the site stays the same. Now you’ve got an awesome content management system, to start leveraging parts of the WP Ecosystem — like running a backup plugin, or Yoast for SEO, or working with an excellent host like WPEngine.

You may feel like you’ve got a Mercedes engine in a 92 Civic body.

The results of that project are cool — you’ve got WordPress and some of its accoutrements. But to the visitor of your website, it’s the same old website. If you’re not happy with your current site, then this simple “move to WordPress” project may not be what you’re looking for. You may feel like you’ve got a Mercedes engine in a 92 Civic body.

Redesigning your website

If you’re looking to redesign your site as part of your migration to WordPress, then you need to think about what that means. Is it a visual redesign? A visual redesign + a new content architecture? If it’s new content architecture, how are you going to make the content? If it’s a visual redesign, do you have a visual identity for your organization that you’re happy with, or will you need to create a new visual identity as a prerequisite to redesigning your website.

Migrating the data

In any case — from the simplest project on up to a full redesign — one thing you always need to consider as you migrate to WordPress is:

“What is the content that you’re bringing over. From where. How much is there? What ‘shape’ does it take — what is the architecture / structure of the information you’ve currently got?”

Answers to those questions may have big implications on the scope of your migration to WordPress. A few blog posts and web pages are very easy to move over to WordPress — it handles those right out of the box. Even if you have a lot of blog posts or simple pages, that’s typically pretty easy to migrate over.

It’s always important to consider the scope of data migration whenever you’re moving from one site to a new one.

When you start talking about custom content types — for example, if you operate many locations and those are described in a special way (address, picture, services offered) and want to move those all over that can be a big thing. Often we see lots of different custom content types — which uniquely describe your business or organization — which inter-relate to one another. Often there are thousands or more of these objects. At that point, Migration can become a significant project on its own.

In general it’s always important to consider the scope of data migration whenever you’re moving from one site to a new one. If overlooked during scoping + planning, you can accidentally miss a huge piece of the project.