Sitecore to WordPress post-migration considerations
Your migration to WordPress is done—now it’s time to see how you did!
Evaluate alignment with migration goals
Now that you’re on WordPress, it’s time to revisit the goals you set at the start of your Sitecore to WordPress migration journey. So return to your goals and see if you’re realizing them already.
Note, however, that certain goals might take a while to fully realize.
For instance, if the primary goal was to reduce costs, it’s unlikely you’ll see the complete financial impact immediately. A more realistic evaluation period is around a year, which will provide a clearer comparison of your ongoing WordPress expenses versus your previous Sitecore costs. This timeline will give you valuable insights into whether WordPress is delivering the anticipated savings and confirm that the migration was a smart investment. (Rest assured, it will!)
Benchmark performance metrics against Sitecore
Post-migration, rerun the performance tests you performed on your Sitecore setup before migrating.
Use tools like PageSpeed Insights to analyze your new WordPress site’s speed and responsiveness. Compare these metrics to your previous Sitecore environment to see how you’re doing.
If there’s room for improving, create an optimization plan.
Analyze user experience and gather feedback
With the new WordPress site live, reach out to all key stakeholders for their insights on the CMS transition:
- Content teams: Are they enjoying the WordPress editor? Is it simpler for them to publish, edit, and manage content compared to Sitecore?
- Marketing teams: Are they finding it easier to create marketing collateral? Has their reliance on IT decreased, and do they feel more empowered?
- Maintenance teams: How smoothly are admins able to handle tasks like updates, plugin maintenance, and other routine activities associated with WordPress? How does this compare to Sitecore?
Survey end users too.
See how your findings can further optimize your new WordPress stack.
Assess SEO impact
Actually give your new WordPress website some time before you analyze your SEO metrics like organic traffic, keyword rankings, and bounce rates.
That’s because search engines, too, have a lot of processing to do—such as indexing your newly migrated content (including any updates), evaluating your internal linking (redirects and all), and assessing backlinks, along with on-site SEO factors like schema markups, site speed, and user experience.
Also, as search engines crawl and re-evaluate your site, you might notice fluctuations in rankings and traffic—but that’s expected.
Things will settle down in a couple months and you’ll have a clearer understanding of how your WordPress site is performing compared to Sitecore on the organic visibility front.
Evaluate functional and technical efficiency
Evaluating functional and technical efficiency is also a longer-term process, as it involves observing how teams adapt to and benefit from WordPress over time.
By evaluating functional and technical efficiency over time, you’ll gain insights into how well WordPress supports your teams in their work.
And how this supports translates to higher productivity… and if it ultimately meets your long-term operational goals.
You can evaluate functional and technical efficiency at various levels:
- Content management
- Marketing agility
- Simplified maintenance
By evaluating each of these aspects, you’ll have a comprehensive view of your WordPress site’s performance and how well it aligns with the goals that prompted your migration.
