Migrating from WordPress to django CMS

What is Vertec?

Marco: We offer an integrated CRM and ERP system for project based service companies. Our vision simply is “Business Software, wie für mich gemacht” which translates to “Business Software, made for me”. We believe that software should adapt around business needs, not the other way around. That’s what we do.

What was the biggest challenge with your old website?

Marco: We were running our website on WordPress and found it increasingly difficult to edit our content in three country versions. Maintaining our content was becoming more and more of a headache. We weren't able to reuse content based on some sort of library, which cost us valuable time. We then chose django CMS because we were looking for a CMS that could:

• Serve several languages

• Offer fast and simple editing

• Allow us to reuse content

• Be understood by our Python developers

• Serve our strong international SEO needs

Were there any special requirements to the CMS?

Marco: We maintain a fairly large knowledge base with a lot of custom functionality and design. It was important that we would be able to migrate to the new CMS and continue to improve it there. Search is another important feature for us. We needed a search integration that would allow editors to configure search behaviour, not developers. 

What did the migration from Wordpress to django CMS process look like?

Marco: External partners included a web designer, two SEO consultants and what. as our implementation partner for django CMS. Before the actual build, we created a series of prototypes for uncertain areas of the project such as knowledge base migration and search integration with Algolia (djangocms-algolia). Design files were then created for all major parts of the website. After that templates were created and filled by our editors, followed by a lot of tweaking. Since we had pretty much all the content from the existing website, we were able to improve the important bits of the content and simply migrate the rest. 

What is special about your new website?

Marco: The Algolia integration is a real highlight for us. The search is super flexible and allows us to provide helpful search results to our visitors. The Knowledge Base has received a lot of positive feedback from our customers. 

What are the main improvements of your new website?

Marco: The relaunched website is fast, both for editors and visitors. It is very adaptable to our constantly changing ideas. The editors save a lot of time now working with django CMS compared to WordPress. Pagespeed was an important factor for us, and we finally managed to offer a really fast website. We also didn't suffer any SEO losses, which is very good for a relaunch. The conversion rate is very high and we constantly get positive feedback for the new website. Major improvements:

• Faster

• More adaptable

• More time efficient

• Higher conversion rate