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Migrating From Business Catalyst to WordPress

26th of March 2021 is D-Day for all Adobe Business Catalyst users. As of that date all Business Catalyst sites will be taken down and all data deleted with no come back button. While 2021 seems like a forever away, we’d recommend not getting too comfortable. Website migration can be a timely and stressful process so it’s best start thinking about the switch now. To help your business make the transition as smooth as possible, we’ve broken down how you can migrate from Business Catalyst to WordPress.

Business Catalyst

Founded by Australians Bardia Housman and Adam Broadway in 2004, Business Catalyst is an all-in-one creation and management solution for business websites. Offering a wide range of benefits to its users, Business Catalyst includes built-in customer service, marketing and sales features such as eCommerce and Email tools. Here at Start, we’re rather fond of Business Catalyst. Once upon a time, our agency used the platform and loved it too. Our Business Catalyst experience alongside technical understanding means we’re in a really good position to help your business migrate to WordPress and never look back.

Why WordPress?

Alongside Joomla and Drupal, WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world. However, unlike all of the rest, WordPress is the most popular CMS. Powering more than 25% of the Internet, WordPress is the home to over 70,000,000 different websites!

As it is for millions of others, WordPress is our go-to CMS for a number of reasons including its ability to cater to every business need, design and functionality flexibility achieved through visual composers and plugins alongside it ease of use for all. In addition to those reasons, WordPress and many compatible plugins such as Yoast and TinyPNG provide a really strong foundation for well-executed and across the board SEO. Furthermore, WordPress is an open-source platform meaning it isn’t going anywhere. (In fact, it actually means the CMS is only going to develop and expand on what it can do for your business now and for years to come.) Breathe easy – your business doesn’t need to worry about going through this migration process again.

WordPress has very few downfalls. In this case, the main one being a business like yours can’t directly move your entire Business Catalyst website to it. However, with that said, none of the top content management systems is capable of doing that either.

So How Do We Migrate?

Unfortunately there is no simple way to copy and paste your site from BC to WordPress. This means everything will need to transfer everything manually. From web design to custom functions, we’ve broken your site into five main categories, highlighting how to migrate each component from Business Catalyst to WordPress.

Website Design

Unfortunately, when it comes to migrating the visual elements of your site to WordPress, there’s no simple hack. Business Catalyst uses HTML whilst WordPress is based on PHP and MYSQL making it impossible to export your code and upload it onto WordPress. While this might seem like a massive bummer, we’d encourage you to do some critical analysis on your website before deciding if it really is. If your current Business Catalyst site has been the same for the past 5 years, it definitely needs a redesign. No business environment is that stagnant.

When it comes to designing your WordPress site, there are two primary options – use a theme or engage with a web design agency to create a custom design. If you’re completely set on your current design, you could get an agency to develop your WordPress site based on the current design.

eCommerce

As a standalone platform, WordPress lacks any in-built eCommerce features but the go to plugin, WooCommerce, is the perfect WordPress solution for any online store. Business Catalyst allows for customer data and products to be migrated to WordPress through exportation of your XML file. While this process isn’t difficult, it might be time-consuming as you’ll likely need to restructure your files.

Blogs/Posts

Whilst enabling the exportation of other features, Business Catalyst currently doesn’t allow exporting of blogs posts. However, using an RSS Feed, your posts can be migrated to WordPress. In order to achieve that, you’ll need to follow these steps:

  1. Create an RSS channel on Business Catalyst
  2. Compile all your RSS channel URLs
  3. Save the RSS files
  4. Import the files into WordPress and assign categories to them

EDM & Mailing Lists

Unlike Business Catalyst, WordPress doesn’t include a built-in email marketing feature. MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Mail Poet are emailing platforms which can be integrated into your WordPress site through plugins. You won’t have to completely start again when it comes to your mailing lists as Business Catalyst allows its users to export email data.

Custom Features/Functionality

If your business is using custom-made Business Catalyst Apps, there’s currently no way to transition these over to WordPress. You’re likely to need to rebuild them through and for WordPress. This is something you’re very likely to need a professional agency to do for you.

Time to Get Thinking

By no means is this a comprehensive, technical break down of how to migrate from Business Catalyst to WordPress. This is just a starting point, intended to help you address the main issues you’re likely to face as a soon to be, no longer Business Catalyst users. It’s time to get moving because as said, migration can be timely and extra stressful. Especially if you’re working against the clock.

Ready to Make Your Move?

If your Perth business or interstate company is looking to migrate from Business Catalyst to WordPress and could do with some assistance, drop us a line. From web design, web develop to just a team to bounce ideas off, we’re here for you and know exactly how to make this migration a great experience.

startdig

We are a collective of designers, coders, producers and technologists from around the world who collaborate on a shared passion for innovative websites. Based in Perth, Western Australia, we bring style and innovation to the projects we undertake. Taking time to understand our clients requirements we strive to produce quality web design work for an affordable price. We then leverage our years of experience to make sure that our websites are responsive, SEO friendly and meet the clients requirements.

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Thoroughly professional and well communicated. Thanks Neil
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I am from Brisbane, my name is Craig, I have a dog training company, it was my first time attempting on page SEO, after calling nearly all SEO companies in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, this was the only place that gave me some time to help me out. 5 star from me, well done in being a human and not worrying about what you could have got from me. hats off to you !. from dogtrainingbegins.com.au
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Knowledgable, inspiring and helpful. Getting my online presence created and managed by the Start Digital is the BEST decision I ever made.
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Neil & The Team at Start Digital are fantastic to work with. Our new website is exceptional. The guys here have fresh, modern ideas and the process from start to finish was flawless. Highly recommended.
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03:57 11 Jun 19
Neil and the team at Start Digital provide such an excellent service and have been a massive help for us since we launched late 2018. Their attention to detail is unmatched compared to other digital agencies we've dealt with, and the team go out of their way to ensure the best result is achieved in the most time & cost efficient way. Thanks again Start Digital
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A huge thank you to Neil and the Start Digital team! We engaged them to redesign our Move Homes website to take our brand to the next level. Not only does the website look fantastic, but throughout the website build we received frequent and transparent communication- we knew exactly what was happening and why. Start Digital listened to what we needed and would offer their advice on how to achieve our goals. Aside from their expertise, they’re also great people and really easy to deal with. We look forward to working on more projects over the coming years!
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Sheila Woods
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Neil Mason and the Start Digital team have done a tremendous job with the design and implementation of Interstaff’s new website. Our brief to Neil was for a clean, modern website which visually communicated our brand values, ‘sharp, dependable, expert and human’ to both business and individual clients, and importantly to offer an engaging and easy-to-navigate online experience optimised for SEO. We are delighted with the design as well as the level of consideration and attention to detail Neil and his team put into shaping the online experience of our brand. Start Digital have been very flexible and easy to collaborate with and nothing was ever too difficult. They went above and beyond – even working over the weekend to help us have our website ready to launch ahead of one of our key business seminars. We look forward to continuing to work with Neil and his team in the future and would definitely recommend their services.
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The Start Digital team built us a new website and have been managing our SEO for over a year now. During that time our site has moved into the top five on page 1 of Google for keywords such as IT Company Perth and IT Support Perth which has increased our traffic considerably. We're very proud of our website and highly recommend Start Digital.
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01:02 16 Feb 18
Neil and his team at Start Digital go above and beyond expectations. Having worked with many web agencies I can honestly say that Start have been one of the most open and cost effective agency I have worked with . They come highly recommeded
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Excellent Perth website design, development and SEO agency
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After years of tolerating our old website, we are now proud owners of a sleek, responsive and easy to use new site, thanks to Start Digital. Professional, practical, affordable and easy to work with-Neil and his stellar team delivered our site along with 22 additional sites for some of our congregations. Our organisation is complex and this project was massive. Throughout the project, Start Digital were flexible and patient with us. They responded quickly to emails and phone calls, kept us in the loop and always made time to touch base in their cool office. We can’t thank the team enough for their tremendous effort. It’s only been a month, but we have received plenty of positive feedback since launching the new site. We look forward to working with Start Digital for future digital projects and highly recommend anyone who needs a new website to give them a call.
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08:25 02 Dec 17
Neil and the team created an AMAZING website for Inventium. We have received so much positive feedback since launch. I highly recommend Start Digital - they are awesome!
Lee Bramley
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03:54 16 Nov 17
Fantastic Service, Really Knowledgeable in all areas of Website and Marketing strategies, they built us a fantastic looking site and nothing was too much for them throughout the process, We also found them to be very reasonably priced compared to other quotes we had, highly recommended.
Dean Capelli
Dean Capelli
06:22 11 Jul 17
Start Digital have built 3 websites for The Highways Group. We've been impressed with their attention to detail and quality of design every time. They're a friendly, professional agency and our go to web team.
John Argiropoulos
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07:45 19 May 17
We highly recommend Start Digital service, their efficient , personnel approach and professional skills gave us great results thanks .
Mitch Capelli
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22:13 25 Nov 16
Knowledgeable and excellent service at a great price I highly recommend Start Digital. We engaged them to redesign our website and manage our online presence. Previously we were a few pages back on a google search, however after only a few months we are in and around the top 5 on the first page. The guys at Start were great to deal with providing straight forward easy to understand information without the typical sales pitch that we have experienced many times before from other providers in the industry. We continue to receive updates on the progress of our website and their SEO service all for a very reasonable rate (ie. much cheaper than we were previously paying for a lesser service)
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Neil and his team was responsible for the design and re-branding of our website, business cards and marketing material. They quickly understood our business, they identified the market we needed to target and delivered an excellent solution to match. We would highly recommend Start Digital.
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Neil and the guys at Start Digital took care of some problems we had with our website performance. They were really efficient, responsive, easy to get along with and gave us some great pointers to help us with SEO. Unlike many digital marketing companies out there, Start Digital were very genuine and well-priced. Would definitely recommend their services to others.
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Great design ideas and technical capability means a complete solution for small and medium sized businesses like us. Neil & Co actually take an interest in what you are trying to achieve rather than just turn and burn volume website factories out there! I recommend them.
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We have had the pleasure of working with the team at Start Digital recently as we wished to update our website for our restaurant business. WOW! An amazing new, innovative, trendy and professional approach taken by these guys has resulted in a brilliant new site, clearly directing so much more traffic through our business resulting in increased brand awareness and google presence. As a relatively new business, Start Digital will definitely be going places ! We really look forward to continuing to work with them in the future and watch both our and their business grow! Thanks Neil and the team at Start Digital.
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