Moving to WordPress from another content management system (CMS) can open new opportunities for your health and wellness brand. An outdated CMS can limit your content strategy, slow down page speeds (which ultimately affects SEO), make it difficult to manage e-commerce and educational content, and contribute to poor mobile performance. It makes it harder for your clients to find the information they need in order to purchase your plans or products.
On the other hand, with WordPress, you can create a clean, scalable, and SEO-optimized website that can elevate your health and wellness brand. You’ll be in good company. More than 43% of websites around the world are powered by WordPress, covering everything from simple blog sites all the way up to enterprise-level clients.
Let’s get deeper into what WordPress migration could mean for your brand.
What Is WordPress Migration?
There are several types of WordPress migrations to consider, depending on the specific situation you’re in.
The first is an infrastructure or hosting migration. This is a host or server move, which often includes a tech stack upgrade. It’s moving your website to a new environment and modernizing the underlying technology to improve performance, scalability, security, and developer productivity.
Next is a URL/identity migration, which is a fairly simple project. This could be moving from one domain to another, moving from a less secure web address to a more secure one, or updating the site structure.
Another kind of WordPress migration is an architecture/structure change, which is moving from a single to multi-site or vice versa, from a headless to a monolith or the opposite, from a page builder to block editor, making a theme framework switch. This is more complex than a standard server-to-server transfer and involves significant alterations.
There is also a content and data migration, which is transferring digital information from one system or storage location to another. This could be a full site copy (known as lift and shift), database only, or offloading a media library to CDN or other object storage like S3 or GCS.
Lasting, one of the more common types is a platform change, or moving from another CMS like Drupal, Joomla, Sitecore, or a custom CMS to WordPress. This could also be a commerce migration, such as moving from Shopify or Magento to WooCommerce. This involves transferring content, users, and occasionally design elements from a different content management system or a custom CMS to WordPress. The complexity and ease of this kind of project will vary and depend on the differences in database structure from the previous CMS to WordPress.
It’s not uncommon to come across health and wellness brands migrating from other CMS, e-commerce platforms like Shopify, limited all-in-one platforms like Wix or Squarespace, or from custom-built platforms to WordPress. Typically, you see this happen as they start to outgrow the functionality of the beginner-friendly, all-in-one platform they began with. Brands also move when they need or want more customization or control over features and integrations. For example, their wellness supplements are taking off, and they need a better e-commerce tool that just won’t work on the previous site.
Using WordPress along with an e-commerce plugin like WooCommerce allows for deep integration with a variety of third-party tools and services. Which, in turn, offers more flexibility for the complex business needs of your brand.
Key Benefits for Health & Wellness Brands
Migrating to a WordPress site can enhance the overall experience for your customers and clients on your health and wellness website, but there are more specific benefits as well.
It can improve your SEO and content visibility, which in turn can help more potential clients find your services or products. It’ll be easier for them to learn about that new mediation app you’ve launched, which can increase conversion rates. Your website will also rank higher on search results, getting it in front of more people looking for your wellness services.
With WordPress, your site can expect faster load times, which will make for better user engagement. The CMS is flexible when it comes to content marketing and education initiatives, so you can help your audience learn more about your various health and wellness projects.
Additionally, it offers thousands of themes and plugins that are specifically built for health and wellness brands, leading to enhanced e-commerce and booking experiences. You can integrate online scheduling plug-ins like Amelia or Bookly to manage appointments and reduce no-shows, while using WooCommerce to sell products or class packages directly from your website. Build a member portal and create exclusive content for members, such as courses or health coaching programs. With WordPress, you can implement custom forms or quizzes to create personalized health and wellness plans.
WordPress will scale with you. As your brand starts to grow, you can move up to WordPress Enterprise Hosting, which was built for high-traffic e-commerce sites and more.
Ndevr’s 3E Framework Approach to Migration
At Ndevr, we have a unique, three-prong approach to ensure that your health and wellness brand has a smooth and successful migration to WordPress. We focus on maintaining a seamless user journey during and after migration to build a strong Audience Experience. Once migration is complete, we ensure that editorial teams can work more efficiently post-migration, building a great Creator Experience. Lastly, we will build a scalable, secure, and more maintainable platform for your health and wellness brand, enhancing the Developer Experience.
Common Challenges and How to Avoid Them
Now, with any migration, there are things to look out for so that the experience is as smooth as possible. These are common issues that happen with a lot of migrations.
One is the risk of declining SEO ranking while you’re in the process of moving from one CMS to WordPress. You can avoid this with careful planning. Before migrating, be sure to assess your current SEO performance, looking at rankings, traffic, and backlink profiles. It’s good to start with a strong understanding of where you sit before moving. Then, while migrating, prioritize keeping the URL structure identical, but if they have to change, implement 301 redirects for every old URL to the new one. It also helps to check that all the content has been migrated accurately, including meta titles, descriptions, headings, and image alt attributes. Update internal links and make sure the new WordPress site is fully responsive and mobile-friendly. Also, after the migration is complete, check for errors, monitor performance, and update external links if the domain has changed.
Another common issue is broken links or missing media. Avoid these issues by backing up your health and wellness website before starting. You can also use a reliable migration plugin that will handle file paths and URLs. During migration, make sure the new site uses relative URLs for images and media rather than absolute paths and that the migration tool correctly updates all database entries for the home and site URLs to the new base URL. After moving, you can update permalinks and use a search and replace plugin to find and replace old URL structures.
Lastly, the loss of historical data or analytics. Avoid this by performing a full backup of your entire site, including all files, databases, themes, plugins, and media uploads. Then, play the analytics setup and decide how you will implement and configure them on the new WordPress site. You can use a plugin to simplify integrating Google Analytics tracking code without editing the site code. Also, this is another issue you can avoid by using a migration plugin. If you don’t use a plugin, be sure to use a search and replace tool to update all internal links. Implementing 301 redirects can also help. Reconfigure your analytics and marketing tools to reconnect them and continue gathering needed data. It also helps to perform a data integrity check.
Successful Migration in the Wellness Space
Still on the fence? Let’s take a look at a health and wellness brand — a fertility coach — who successfully migrated to WordPress.
The previous website had an outdated design with confusing navigation. It also had a basic shared server, which meant slow load times and frequent downtimes. There was a lack of SEO optimization and a structured path that led clients from the homepage to booking a coach or signing up for a masterclass.
Not only was the website migrated to WordPress, but it also underwent a massive redesign. It was given an updated look using fonts and colors that reflected the brand and its aesthetic. This also included a strategic layout that made it easier for clients to book services as well as strong CTAs to get them to act. After the migration, there were faster page load times, which helped increase SEO optimization and user experience. The new site had 100% mobile responsiveness and organically improved visibility. There was also a jump in registrations for the email newsletter, and it saw higher brand credibility.
Start Your WordPress Migration
Ready to start moving your health and wellness brand to WordPress? Contact us to set up a free discovery call.
