Website migration to WordPress

A small businessman sees his webhosting costs increase by 40% without notice beforehand. Although not my expertise, I’m asked for advice because the businessman knows what I stand for: Openness, honesty and a drive for optimal quality.

A short preliminary research shows a vendor-lock-in: The site was created using a vendor-specific site-builder without the option to create and download a backup in any way. This brings us towards two goals: Cost-saving and vendor-lock-out for the future. WordPress seems to provide a good solution as there are a lot of WordPress-hosting providers, of which many offer the option to create a backup and restore it anywhere.

Proof of Concept

Since the site is far from complex, we decide to investigate the feasibility of rebuilding the site on a local dockerised WordPress environment.
Looking at the main goals of cost-saving and vendor-lock-out, we notice:

  • Current provider does not support multi-lingual sites, causing the organisation to have multiple domains for each supported language.
    As WordPress supports multi-lingual sites, the organisation can move back to a single domain. Commercially this looks a lot better and this alone already brings in a large piece in the goal of cost-saving.
  • Full-vendor-lockout: Migrating/copying a site is very easy, proven by simply migrating between two docker environments. Next time moving from one provider to another is not much more than a few simple steps.
  • WordPress-only providers appear to be a lot cheaper than the current one.
  • Once a base is created in WordPress, rebuilding the site is limited to a lot of copy/paste.

On top of this, some nice additional options appear to pop up:

  • After a small learning curve, the site already becomes just that bit more visually appealing.
  • Rebuild means taking another look at things and re-evaluate what’s currently there. By simply looking at the content, new ideas pop up, resulting in small improvements.
  • The option to migrate/copy a full site brings in additional possibilities:
    • Big changes can be tested without any impact on the live site. Only publish through migration/copy once satisfied.
    • The organisation can test, fail, learn and start all over again locally, making it more feasible to test with large-impact improvements.
    • The organisation already sees several options for a larger make-over in the future.

Conclusion after Proof of Concept

By investing in rebuilding the site in WordPress, the following goals are reached:

  • A cost saving of approximately 75% in two years.
  • No dependency on one specific provider (Vendor-lock-out).
  • Small visual improvements on the site straight away.
  • Large visual improvements on the site on the longer term, if desired.

Follow up

The Proof of Concept results in starting and finishing a follow up where:

  • The website is fully rebuilt in the local docker environment.
  • A provider-compare resulting in a final choice for a new provider.
  • Copying the local version to the new provider and make it active.
  • Move the main domain to the new provider
  • Stop the language-specific extra domains.

Final result

Despite of the investment in this project, the cost savings thrive. On the longer term, the financial gain only grows while the organisation has better options for improving its website to the marked need, that can be tested thoroughly in an isolated environment.

Core competences

  • Docker basic skills
  • Docker Compose
  • WordPress knowledge (acquired on the fly)
  • General knowledge on how a website is creagted
  • Efficient use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a part of both development and learning processes