Get exactly what you need.

One of the main reasons to move to WordPress is that you’ll get what you want.

Tired of trying to bend everything into your existing content management system? With a bespoke build, you’ll get everything you need and nothing your don’t want.

If your old CMS just doesn’t cut it anymore, give us a call on 01295 266644 and we’ll talk you through the process.

Get started

What we do.

Moving your site needs to be done properly.

If you have a website built on another CMS like Squarespace or Magento, you are going to have content that already ranks in the search engines and an existing URL structure.

Moving your site is more than simply copying over the text and image content – care has to be taken to maintain URL structures and existing SEO.

In short, the process involves a step-by-step procedure:

  • A complete technical, on-page and off-page SEO review of your current site
  • Full content and internal linking review
  • Page structure and URL structure review
  • Automated migration of content (where possible)
  • Rebuild of page and post hierarchy (if required)
  • Rebuild of categories, tags and product taxonomy (if required)
  • Rebuild of post and page content (if required)
  • 301 redirects (if required)

There’s obviously theme and template work that also needs to be complete, but the above steps help to ensure your new site matches your old one as closely as possible.

Get started

Get started with a free review of your current site.

If you’re considering moving to WordPress, we can take a quick look at your current site and provide you with a free estimate to complete the project.

We’ll audit your current site to give you a benchmark score, check your current SEO and rankings and provide a proposal detailing what we can do, what this will improve and how much it will cost.

If you’d like to chat through the process on the phone, give us a call on 01295 266644.

Moving a large site from Expression Engine to WordPress.

We helped Fresh Relevance move their large EE site over to WordPress to make it easier for the marketing team to manage pretty much every aspect of the site.

Move to WordPress

Why move your site to WordPress?

WordPress is the most used CMS on the planet, and moving your site over to a WP install will realise lots of benefits.

Whatever CMS you currently use, moving your site to WordPress will improve your site.

There is no CMS that’s easier to use, more customisable and better for technical and on-page SEO.

Here are some reasons to seriously consider a migration to WordPress:

  1. Get everything you need and nothing you don’t.
  2. Make managing all your content quick and easy without having to put a call to the developers.
  3. Take control of your on-page SEO in-house and save time and money.
  4. Future-proof your site by avoiding the non-backwards compatible upgrades other CMSs enforce.
  5. Manage other aspects of your site that you thought were impossible, from your logo to menus, favicons, footer sections, etc.
  6. Take advantage of 100s of perfectly coded plugins to add functions to your site at the click of a button.
  7. Separate your content from the website markup, meaning that updating your site design or branding in the future does not mean starting again.
  8. Optimise your site using plugins like Autoptimise or WP Rocket and tie these into Cloudflare DNS servers to make your site even faster.
  9. Take control over categories and tags to organise your content.
  10. Customise your permalink (URL) structure for better SEO.

Moving to WordPress FAQs

Here are some answers to common questions about moving non-WordPress sites to a bespoke WordPress site.

How does my site’s content get migrated to WordPress?

Depending on your current CMS, there are a range of automated options for more common CMSs like Drupal, Joomla, Magento, etc. A third-party app can migrate over your text and images, categories, tags and even users.

For more niche CMSs or bespoke sites, we can also try to scape your current site and migrate to WordPress, but this is general only for the text and image content.

Can I retain my current URL structure for SEO?

We always try and maintain this to ensure you don’t see a drop in rankings. As WordPress has a very flexible permalink structure, and by using custom-post-types with their bespoke URL structures, we can generally keep everything the same as it currently is to avoid too many 301 redirects.

Will a migration to WordPress affect my current SEO?

WordPress is famous for easy on-page and technical SEO, so your new site will be better than your previous one in terms of how it’s built and its speed.

When pushing any new site live, even with the same content, there can be a period of fluctuation in the SERPs as Google (et al) spiders you new site for the first time, but this settles down and you should see a boost across your placements.

How long does it take to migrate a site to WordPress?

This depends entirely on the size of the current site and how much of the content can be automatically migrated.

Some clients ask us to rebuild the old site to the same design, while others go for a full redesign as part of the process, so this can add a few weeks to the project.

Anywhere from 8-20 weeks is a timeframe for site migrations, but they can be accomplished quicker if everything is lined up.

Will the new WordPress site mirror the current site’s functionality?

WordPress has more plugins than any other CMS, so if you use a plugin on your current site, WordPress will have the equivalent. Customisation is also far easier on WP than on other CMSs, so if some bespoke WordPress work is required, we can sort that, too.

Will there be any site downtime?

This will be kept to a minimum and is only a consideration when we finally switch the sites. We develop all-new WP sites on secure servers, so your live site will not be affected during the build process. When ready, we pick up and move WP to your hosting or repoint your DNS to ours. There can often be a little wait for the DNS to resolve and the SSL certificates (included in our hosting) to become active.

Does WordPress have a steep learning curve compared to my current CMS?

You will find WordPress easier to use if you have used any other CMS. This is partly down to WordPress itself, how well-built the CMS is, and how we build bespoke WordPress sites. There’s no messing about with HTML, CSS or anything like that, so you can concentrate on publishing great content.

Does WordPress have any hidden costs to consider?

To get the best out of WordPress, we suggest some premium plugins for the sites we build. The main one is the fantastic ACF plugin, which we use for building bespoke blocks, and there are a few others, such as Gravity Forms and 301 Redirects Pro. We include these in our builds, and if you elect to host with Toast or go on a support retainer, you can use these free of charge as we pay for the developer-level licenses.

Get moving to WordPress

Migration to WordPress example

Migrations from Artisan CMSs.

The Zenloop migration was a project to move a 1300-page website from a niche CMS called Grav to WordPress. These projects are significant and take time, as larger websites often have very bespoke requirements.

Get your site migrated to WordPress.

Common migrations to WordPress.

Here a some examples of typical CMS migrations to WordPress and an outline of what’s involved.

Expression Engine to WordPress Migrations.

If you want to migrate from EE to WordPress, the content can be exported in a format that the WordPress importer can understand, making the content part of the migration run smoothly. Replicating the Expression Engine functions, URL structure, and SEO is no problem, so this is generally a straightforward migration.

We worked with Fresh Relevance to move their 700+ page website from Expression Engine to WordPress.

Joomla to WordPress Migrations.

Joomla has been around for years but now has such a low market share it’s often only the hardcore fans that continue to battle with sites on this CMS. As it’s not the most intuitive to use, migrations from old Joomla sites to WordPress are common.

Most of the migration from Joomla to WordPress can be automated, so getting the content into WordPress, ready for a new theme design, is pretty straightforward.

Drupal to WordPress Migrations.

Drupal is a strong player in the CMS market, but people often wish to move off the platform if they have older versions that can no longer be updated. Various versions of Drupal reached end-of-life status, with updates to Drupal 9 only available from newer versions of version 8.

As Drupal is such a popular CMS, automated migrations are an option for this CMS too, with text content, categories and other content moving smoothly over to WordPress.

Hosted solutions such as Squarespace and WIX.

These types of migrations tend to be good old copy-and-paste affairs or scrapes. Typically, as Squarespace and WIX sites tend to be a lot smaller, it’s often the easiest way of doing a migration, and you don’t want any SEO coming over as it will all need to be done from scratch to get it up to par.

WordPress to WordPress migration.

We do these too! Mainly these are migrations from WordPress sites built on Elementor, Divi or other page builders over to faster, leaner and easier-to-manage bespoke themes for clients who want to get serious about SEO.

You’d think that this would be the easiest type of WordPress migration, but given all the shortcodes and rubbish code these sites have, there’s a fair bit of unpacking to do first (luckily there are some plugins to help with that).

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