ASP.NET to WordPress Migration Success Story: Dealer Spike
About Dealer Spike
Dealer Spike, a flagship brand from the LeadVenture family, delivers advanced digital solutions tailored for Powersports, Marine, Trailer, Agriculture, Truck, Heavy Equipment and Outdoor Power Equipment. Dealer Spike’s mission is to equip dealers with innovative tools to boost online visibility and fuel sales growth.
The need for an alternative platform for evolving digital landscape
Dealer Spike had been running its website on a custom platform built with the ASP.NET framework. While the platform was effective initially, Dealer Spike began encountering challenges with expanding its editorial capabilities, integrating new tools, and reducing dependence on IT resources.
The ambitious marketing team at Dealer Spike felt that they needed to achieve better content discoverability and deliver top-notch user experience. Additionally, Dealer Spike wanted to improve how it displayed its offerings on its website. As Dealer Spike’s marketing and editorial needs further evolved, it became clear that the team needed a more flexible solution to handle its content management.
Recognizing these challenges, Dealer Spike reached out to rtCamp to migrate its website from the ASP.NET framework to WordPress and to redesign its flagship website with a fresh UI/UX.
Migrating to WordPress and a complete redesign
To turn things around, Dealer Spike decided to migrate to WordPress with a new design that effectively showcased their different offerings. To bring Dealer Spike’s vision to life, we first collaborated with nclud, who crafted an impressive design. We then seamlessly translated this design into a custom WordPress theme while migrating Dealer Spike from their legacy platform to WordPress.
Simplifying content creation with the Gutenberg editor
To address Dealer Spike’s content management challenges—especially reducing the editorial and marketing teams’ reliance on IT for daily tasks—we customized WordPress’s default Gutenberg editor to fit the teams’ content processes.
With WordPress, Dealer Spike’s editorial team experienced the ease and efficiency of the Gutenberg editor firsthand. For the first time, they were able to create, edit, and manage their content without requiring any technical expertise.
The customized Gutenberg blocks that rtCamp created as part of the modular redesign enabled the marketing teams to rapidly produce landing pages and promotional content. As a result, marketing campaigns reached the market faster, with no developer dependency.
Dealer Spike was also able to reduce its total cost of ownership by minimizing the need for IT support and developer resources for day-to-day work.
Executing a comprehensive content migration with full data integrity
To move Dealer Spike’s content to WordPress, we went with a hybrid migration approach. Automated scripts handled the bulk migration of a large volume of posts, However, pages with specialized layouts were migrated manually (since most such cases were unique)
Additionally, we took the migration as an opportunity to clean up the database and, by extension, the content. All the edge cases were handled manually to ensure that no critical content was overlooked.
Using this hybrid migration strategy, we successfully transferred more than 1,000 posts over to WordPress.
Partnering with rtCamp was a great decision. They handled our website migration, enhancing both performance and usability. They made sure our content teams didn’t depend on developers for layout and editorial changes. Their communication and hands-on support made the transition easier. We now have a more efficient site and the tools to manage it ourselves.
Shelby Spainhower
Director of Demand Generation at LeadVenture
Maintaining SEO equity while migrating
With the platform migrations, maintaining SEO equity is one of our top concerns. To do so for the Dealer Spike, we added Yoast SEO to the team’s new WordPress stack. The SEO metadata for blogs was migrated through an automated process. For pages, since all had the same metadata, we configured Yoast SEO to generate it dynamically based on page titles and content.
We also worked on URLs to ensure that the URL structure was preserved. In instances where maintaining the old URL structure wasn’t feasible, we implemented redirection rules to avoid any loss in search rankings.
Securing performance gains
An optimized WordPress setup, combined with performance-focused development practices, achieved a remarkable 80% increase in average site performance across pages. These improvements resulted in faster load times, reduced bounce rates, and increased conversion rates, significantly enhancing the overall user experience.
Before the migration
Page speed scores for one of the pages
After the migration
Seamless lead generation integration
Dealer Spike wanted to maintain its lead generation workflow while migrating to WordPress. Previously, Dealer Spike used Pardot forms embedded through iframes on its website. This posed several challenges. This setup couldn’t capture UTM parameters, making it difficult to track the sources of form submissions. Additionally, depending on other teams to implement and update these iframe-based forms caused delays and prevented quick corrections when issues arose.
To overcome these challenges, we integrated Gravity Forms, a leading WordPress form solution, directly with Pardot. This new setup provided Dealer Spike greater control over their forms and the data collected, enabling more precise tracking and analysis of lead sources. This integration also streamlined lead management, supporting the long sales cycle by delivering timely updates throughout the prospect’s journey.
Empowering the Dealer Spike team with customized training
We provided Dealer Spike’s team detailed training and user manuals, equipping them with the tools to manage and update their new WordPress site on their own—considerably reducing their need for ongoing external support.
We also held a session where we walked a developer from the Dealer Spike team through the codebase to help him (and the team) understand the big picture.
30-day Hypercare support
Like in most migration projects, we offered a 30-day post-launch hypercare support period. This ensured that the Dealer Spike team had enough time for a smooth transition and could get any concerns addressed by us during this period.
Future outlook
Since LeadVenture is a conglomerate with multiple sites, Dealer Spike’s migration to WordPress serves as a foundation, and a template for all other LeadVenture brands. This project sets the stage for aligning all brand websites under a similar tech stack and standard practices to ensure consistency across brands.
Considering switching to WordPress from your current CMS? Get in touch for a free consultation.
