Migration from Django to WordPress CMS for a global performance marketing publication – PerformanceIN.

Overview

PerformanceIN is the leading global performance marketing publication, shedding light on the most important matters around the measurable side of marketing. Their website – www.performancein.com was built on Django CMS. The PerformanceIN team wanted to switch to a better CMS like WordPress to improve content publishing experience and increase user engagement. They were also aiming to complete this migration before their influencer marketing award event in April 2020. Multidots and PerformanceIN team worked together and launched a new website powered by WordPress. 

Challenges

  • PerformanceIN founded in 1999, since then it has been helping and serving their community of thousand members and followers. 
  • Performancein.com was built on the Django framework around 10 years ago, which failed to enrich the publishing experience for the editorial team and hindering to user engagement with content. 
  • The rapidly growing community of members and surged visitor traffic on the website created a need to optimize the web page speed & performance. 
  • They were looking for a WordPress expert who has experience migrating websites from other CMS to WordPress without losing the SEO rankings.
  • The editorial team at PerformanceIN wanted to personalize few workflows which Django CMS failed to offer.

Solutions

  • Multidots “Solutions Architect” lead a “Discovery” phase with the PerformanceIN team to assess their old setup, sitemap, and configurations. 
  • During the “Discovery” phase, we organized their web pages between simple CMS pages, pages with few complex elements, and pages required advanced configuration. 
  • We made a list of custom “Gutenberg Blocks”, “Plugins” and “Widgets” we needed to build to offer the customization, personalization, and other configurations and controls the editorial team was looking for. 
  • Multidots team prepared page wise test cases to ensure after migration to WordPress things are not broken on any of the pages on the live website. 
  • With the help of our Technical SEO Specialists, we developed a plan to protect the SEO rankings during the migration
  • With the help of our “Page Performance” expert, we prepared a “Performance Checklist” and guideline to increase maximum page performance and loading speed. 
  • Our WordPress Engineers built  WP-CLI-script to migrate thousands of authors, news articles, blogs,  Jobs, and members from Django CMS to WordPress. 

Results

  • The new website was ready before their event and is up and running on WordPress since April 2020. 
  • The editorial team is delighted with the new improved publishing experience and workflow. 
  • The new website has 24% faster avg. page-load time and 50% faster server response time compared to previous CMS.
PerformanceIN-Performance

Company Info:

PerformanceIN provides training, insights, and tech news for eCommerce, Marketing, and the Performance Marketing Industry Globally. It connects and engages with the performance marketing community whilst facilitating industry debate, education, and rewarding innovation, success, and best practice. In addition to the B2B PerformanceIN publication, they organize international conferences and award ceremonies for the performance marketing sector.

PerformanceIN holds a number of Global Conferences for 1,000+ delegates in London, New York, Germany, and The Netherlands and holds the World’s largest Performance Marketing Awards hosting 1,000 Delegates for a black-tie Dinner in London’s prestigious Grosvenor House Hotel.