Custom CMS to WordPress Migration for Everyday Carry
About Everyday Carry
A person’s everyday-carry (EDC) are the daily essentials that help them navigate life’s little challenges. As the website behind the popularized term, Everyday Carry provides a platform for EDC enthusiasts to share their gear and discover others’. Everyday Carry is a subsidiary of Ridge, known for their minimalist titanium wallets and robust EDC gear.
Requirement: Custom CMS to WordPress Migration
Everyday Carry had been running their website on a custom PHP CMS. It had served their purpose for long, but was now slowing down publishing and increasing financial overhead.
Everyday Carry also wanted to shift from being a community-driven site for EDC enthusiasts to a content-first publication working alongside social media platforms. Being aware of the pleasant editorial experience and ecosystem benefits, the team had already set WordPress in their sights.
They approached rtCamp to migrate to WordPress from the custom CMS and modernize their flagship website.
Custom CMS, Custom Problems
The custom PHP CMS was put together and maintained by different contractors over multiple years.
The tech debt had finally surpassed its due date and was now accruing late fees: The site was bloated with unnecessary functionalities and the non-documented, non-standard codebase made it difficult to add required features.
The CMS featured a rudimentary editing interface. Content editors had to navigate to multiple different pages to add metadata such as the featured image, categories & tags, slug, and even the publishing date.
All of this distracted from the core publishing experience. The Everyday Carry team felt locked-in and unconfident about the site’s security.
Editing interface of the custom CMS
Intuitive Editing Interface
Everyday Carry’s new WordPress website offers a holistic editing experience with the WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) ‘Gutenberg’ interface.
Editors can set the featured image, categories, tags, slug, and even SEO keywords on the same page as they edit the content. They can add new author profiles without developer help. They can quickly switch between editing and live preview at the click of a button.
All in all, the new website provides a hassle-free, delightful editing experience.
The modern WordPress UX was easy to pick up and even easier to use, and also allows me and my team to make quick changes for all our editorial needs. One critical example here is the ability to divide our articles into blocks, allowing us to rearrange and reorganize simply by clicking and dragging; on the old CMS this would sometimes require manual HTML manipulation to get things “just right” and also remove garbage code introduced into the layout, like unintended, and other similar layout codes which made them a pain to clean up.
– Mikey Bautista, Director of Everyday Carry Operations at The Ridge.
Modern Publishing Experience
By migrating to WordPress, Everyday Carry was able to unlock everything that web publishing has to offer today.
Turnaround time for our article publication has been significantly reduced, with the added benefit of my team being able to together content much quicker and more consistently, meaning my job as editor is made easier. Overall, it’s been a much more productive experience, on top of our articles looking much better.
Mikey Bautista
Director of Everyday Carry Operations at The Ridge
As a content-first CMS, WordPress provides mission-critical functionalities required for publishing out of the box. Basic things like integration with Google Analytics 4 and other third-party tools like writing assistants are readily available. The new website is responsive and optimized for mobile devices, a must for any publisher. Thanks to the vast plugin ecosystem, new features can be added at the click of a button or can be developed quickly.
This way, Everyday Carry is well-equipped to focus on their content goals first, and build out social sharing, newsletter, and other features as they go.
A Seamless Migration with New Hosting
rtCamp migrated over 8,00 posts, authors, and related metadata, and took the opportunity to clean up the database and by extension, the content.
WordPress enabled a friendly writing interface with Gutenberg and unlocked access to several pre-built and well-maintained solutions that EDC can build atop of. With the codebase up to standard, performance, security, and code readability has greatly improved, ensuring that EDC are in a great place to build out new features and integrations.
The new website lives in its new home on WP Engine. With post-launch support in the form of a 30-day Slack channel, an in-depth manual that covers WordPress basics as well as features specific to the website, Everyday Carry is ready to start a new phase.
Custom CMSs tend to become bloated, complex and outdated over time. If you are considering a CMS migration to WordPress, get a free consultation from us for a smooth transition and accelerate your business.
Ready to start a new phase? Find out if WordPress is the right replacement for your custom CMS.
