Here at Lake Solutions, we not only build and maintain websites but are skilled and experienced at migrating projects from one platform to another – typically from Sitecore to Umbraco but we have been involved with other migrations as well.
The question is, of course, why would you make the decision to change your content management system (CMS) provider? There are a number of reasons. It might be that your business has evolved and you require additional features your current CMS provider doesn’t provide. Perhaps you want to add e-commerce to your website, develop a deeper relationship with your customers and include personalisation, or you are expanding internationally and need to add a multilingual aspect to your site?
Your financial situation might have changed and the budget for marketing is reduced – meaning that you can no longer afford to pay for the CMS that you’re on, even if it’s currently a good fit. Alternatively, your CMS provider might change its subscription model or increase the cost of its licence – again, pushing it outside your current budget.
Alternatively, you might discover that your current CMS is becoming too complex for your needs, maybe in turns on functionality which you simply don’t need or infrastructure you struggle to support. We have also supported a migration where the client has basically been informed that it isn’t the right sort of client for its existing CMS provider and has unexpectedly found itself on the look-out for a new one.
Here at Lake Solutions, we have seen examples where a company is running its CMS off a single server and an impending upgrade has meant that it can no longer run in this way. In this case, the cost and complexity of the upgrade has meant that it’s more efficient to move to a different CMS provider. At the other end of the scale, the CMS might simply be coming to the end of its life and will no longer be supported.
Whatever the reason that a migration is called for, we can support a business both find a new CMS which works for their business and then manage the project to migrate its current website. This whole process is made easier if we are moving from one Microsoft stack CMS to another Microsoft stack-based CMS – as the development/technology methodologies over-lap. It really can just be the case of lifting the business architecture across from one CMS to the other – which we’ve completed a number of times here at Lake Solutions very efficiently. This is a much better scenario than re-writing the entire website from scratch.
Of course, some businesses will use the decision to move from one CMS to another as the reason to re-design their website entirely, while others will simply leave the user experience as it is.
If it is just a ‘lift and shift’ scenario, then we do our best to mirror the CMS experience for our clients. This means that content editors will find the new CMS familiar and be able to navigate it fairly easily. This saves both time and money and any impact on staff training is minimised.
Once the migration has happened, it shouldn’t affect any links which you are currently sharing and it shouldn’t negatively impact on your SEO efforts.
If you want to find out more about migrating your website from one CMS to another, do get in touch on tel: 020 3397 3222.