WordPress Website Migration
As the internet landscape has evolved, the once-dominant WordPress platform has faced increasing competition from other website builders. While WordPress is still a well-known option, the emergence of platforms like Squarespace and Shopify has introduced superior options for site security, aesthetics, ease of upkeep, and overall user-friendliness. With the guidance of a professional web designer, the process of migrating a WordPress website to the Squarespace platform can be quick and seamless, offering businesses and individuals a range of benefits that make the investment well worth the effort.
Let’s go over the details about migrating a WordPress website and the benefits of making the move.
What is a website migration?
A website migration is the process of moving a website from one platform, server, or hosting environment to another. This can involve transferring content, data, and functionality to a new website or content management system. The goal of a website migration is to improve the website's performance, security, design, and overall user experience for both website visitors and website owners alike.
Why should I switch platforms from WordPress?
There are several reasons why web users should consider migrating their website from WordPress. Here are five to start:
Performance and Speed: WordPress.org, while versatile, can be resource-intensive, especially when running multiple plugins and themes. This can lead to slower page load times, negatively impacting user experience and search engine optimization (SEO). Migrating to a more lightweight and optimized platform can significantly improve website performance and speed.
Security and Maintenance: WordPress is a popular target for cyber attacks due to its widespread use and open-source platform. Keeping WordPress and its plugins up-to-date is time-consuming and ongoing, and vulnerabilities can still be exploited. Migrating to a platform with robust built-in security features maintained by one team (with no updating needed!) can better protect your website and its content.
User-friendliness: WordPress requires a steeper learning curve and ongoing maintenance to ensure the website remains secure and up-to-date. In contrast, Squarespace offers a user-friendly platform with a drag-and-drop interface, making it easy for novice users to manage their websites in-house.
Cost-Effectiveness: While WordPress is primarily a free and open-source CMS, the long-term costs associated with maintaining and scaling a WordPress website can add up. Migrating to a closed-source platform with a more transparent and predictable pricing model can provide better cost-effectiveness in the long run.
Visually Pleasing Design: Squarespace emphasizes a clean, minimalist aesthetic focusing on content presentation, making it a popular choice for businesses and individuals seeking a polished, professional-looking website.
What is our process of migrating a website from WordPress?
We make the migration process as straightforward for our clients as possible. First, we start by creating the new site within Squarespace and work through all updates while your current site stays live. Once the new site is prepared, we follow a number of technical steps to ensure a seamless connection (or transfer) of your domain and the disconnection of your old WordPress site and hosting.
Using a web developer for migration success.
Using a web developer is the best way to successfully migrate your website from WordPress because there are many places where things can go awry. Technical items like compatibility, design formatting, URL redirects, DNS adjustments, and proper account setups are just a few examples of how we can help make the process straightforward.
Our History and Expertise with WordPress
We happily built on WordPress from 2013-2016, and those sites served our clients and our business well during that era. The main problem was that after extensive training, our clients still couldn’t upkeep their own sites or stay on top of the mandatory security processes, which meant they had to pay more for us to upkeep it for them. After dealing with continual complexities and challenges, this working relationship wasn’t empowering for us or our clients, and we were all burning valuable time. Enter Squarespace. Once we built our first site on Squarespace, we never looked back and ended up moving every past client to the new platform. Our training success rate when from 20% to 95% and our clients were happier to call us for technical and design work as needed. To date, we’ve transferred over 100 WordPress websites to Squarespace, so we have plenty of experience in the process. Through our experience and expertise, we ensure a seamless transition for others.
What is the cost?
This all depends on the scope of your project. Some websites are small and simple, creating a straightforward project. Others are more detailed, requiring heavy lifting. With an evaluation of your current website, hosting account, and domains, we’ll provide you a bid.
For more answers to your WordPress migration questions, feel free to contact Matt at Appear Design. He has led the charge in migrating over 100 WordPress websites to Squarespace, and the results speak for themselves: happy clients!
