If there’s one thing we believe, it’s that successful client relationships are built on trust. We see this trust in action whenever a client comes to us to help them solve another challenge. Most times, these are new solutions for a client’s growing business. Other times, it’s an opportunity to add features to an existing tool.
Whatever the challenge, our clients trust us to deliver tailored solutions that are built for the long run. This opportunity was a chance to build on that trust by helping our client solve a time-sensitive crisis.
Our client is a leader in technological innovation and invests in medical, industrial, and broadcast imaging technologies. Over the last five years, we have developed mobile and web applications for the client, and this was an opportunity to help them with a unique challenge.
The Challenge
One of our clients called us with a unique challenge. They had three WordPress websites that they needed migrated to a new host—and they had two months to make it happen.
This is an extremely short amount of time for this scope of work, but we knew how critical the sites are for their business. They needed three websites migrated to a new host, with one requiring a digital asset management (DAM) tool. The challenge was the existing DAM couldn't be migrated. We needed to find a new DAM solution and migrate all the assets and metadata. The website with the digital asset management tool provides access to photo and video assets for our clients’ marketing partners.
While we have extensive experience with WordPress, the digital asset management tool would be an opportunity to expand our team’s skillsets. It was an exciting challenge because the previous consultancy used its digital asset management tool license for the client’s marketing portal. The cost for a new license would be in the six-figure range, something our client wanted to avoid.
The Solution
We’ve developed a framework for website migrations built on our experiences over the years:
- Analyze the site and determine infrastructure requirements.
- Create new environments, including development, staging, and production.
- Migrate the site data and content.
- Testing and quality assurance.
- Launch.
- Testing and maintenance.
We decided to split the work into two projects to meet the deadline. The WordPress migration started with a review of what plugins were installed and performed a security audit. Our hosting platform of choice is WP Engine, which has robust support for most major plugins. WordPress sites can run almost anywhere, so this process was very straightforward. We were also able to add 24/7 monitoring to the sites to ensure we’d be alerted to any issues.
WP Engine also provides the ability to auto-update WordPress plugins. If you have ever worked on WordPress, you know that dreaded feeling when you see a notification that six updates are available. WP Engine’s auto-update feature will do just that—update plugins as they are ready, and it runs a complete test of the WordPress instance to check for issues. WP Engine automatically rolls back the update to keep the sites available for our client’s customers if any issues are identified.
For the second project, we investigated multiple digital asset management tools and decided on Brandfolder. The tool provided a critical part of the project—bulk ingestion. We would need to move thousands of photos, videos, and other image types into the new system, and doing that one by one would take months. Brandfolder’s price point, feature set, and bulk ingestion tool made it the right choice.
The Result
Launching the news sites was the most straightforward part of the project, requiring only a few DNS changes to point from the previous host to WP Engine. But the launch is not the end of the project. We’re continuing to provide support and maintenance to ensure site updates, uptime, and security.
Joe Reda, CTO at BitBakery, said this project was an opportunity to truly be a partner for our client.
“The main thing is that our client was in a jam. Our contact phoned us, saying, ‘You saved my bacon.’ That’s what we wanted to do—give them a quick turnaround that was a reliable solution,” Reda added.
