27 Feb What is CMS Migration
In the early days of the Internet, web consultants would place a series of html pages onto a web server, each of them linking to another to make up a website. The images would be kept in a folder of their own and referenced from each page.
Then came the battle of the Content Management System (CMS). Web consultant firms all over the world became joined in a race to develop the winning solution for administering and managing websites. For a while they were onto a winning business model, for as long as they developed something their clients could use easily, they could then charge a subscription fee for its continued development, and all on-top of the initial build costs. They then enjoyed having their clients locked in to use their system for which they could charge again for training and upgrades.
But too many factors were beyond the control of these independent web consultants. However much control they gave to their clients for managing their websites, and however easy they made it to do, they were prone to miss out on much of the functionality which was needed to make the website really valuable: How does it rank in the search engines.
SEO (search engine optimisation) is the activity which gets websites indexed well, and listed highly whenever someone enters a search term they are targeting. Custom-built CMSes were notoriously bad at keeping up with SEO rules and this led to their websites sliding down the rankings and being replaced by younger (often less useful) sites simply because they presented themselves in a more digestible manner to the search engines.
Popularity of CMS types
These days the most effective CMSes are all open source. Whether it is the way they are developed (simultaneously by thousands of developers all the time), or just because its 100% free (running down the usual advantages enjoyed by paid solutions), all the search engines seem to favour open source software. In our tests, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla websites all feature more strongly in search results than do sites built on commercial CMS’s. Microsoft has a strong solution in this field but – perhaps unsurprisingly – Google doesn’t appear to favour it over any of the others. Indeed the opposite seems the case.
Now that it has been discovered what a strong position sites can take when they are on the right platform, migrating CMS is quite commonplace. More and more websites are moving their static html websites to a CMS, or from a less facilitated CMS to WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.
Often it can be done without any apparent changes to the website itself, meaning no regular visitors would ever notice something had occurred behind the scenes. Remarkable things can happen to traffic numbers following CMS migration. Web Inclusion has witnessed as much as 30% increase in sales within a single year purely as a result of CMS migration.
If you are considering migrating your site to a different CMS see this article:
Which CMS is right for my website?
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