Adobe Business Catalyst (BC) is Shutting Down
Time to Migrate Your BC Website & Transfer Its Data to WordPress (WP)

You’re probably already aware that Adobe has announced the discontinuation and end of life of its popular website platform Business Catalyst (BC).

The website content management system (CMS) will be shutting down on March 26th, 2021. After this date, all websites made and managed within the platform will no longer be live. They’ll no longer be accessible to the general public or site administrators. All data associated with the website including previous orders, subscribers, webpage content, images and more will be permanently deleted.

Adobe Business Catalyst users need to find an alternative CMS for their website before this date if they wish to keep it live. If you’ve decided to shut down your website permanently you should still seriously consider downloading all its data. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to access it again. All that hard work and effort gone.

We recommend establishing your new website and downloading all your Business Catalyst data well before BC shuts down and is no longer available. You’ll want to have at least a 2-3 month buffer up your sleeve just in case you encounter any hurdles along the way.

Aim to establish your new website no later than January 1, 2021. Your new site should be up and running, fully functional, by then. Depending on the size of your existing site you’ll need to plan ahead. Most sites can be set up and migrated to a new platform in 4 to 6 weeks. Larger sites may require more time.

Here at Digital Marketing Insights, we recommend that companies affected should consider migrating (transferring) your old BC site over to WordPress.

Here’s why.

Why is WordPress The Best Option for My Website?

WordPress already powers over 30% of the web. It’s one of the most robust, customisable and user-friendly content management systems on the market. It has full e-commerce integration capacity and can easily connect to advertising platforms like Google and Facebook to power your sales and leads.

WordPress is an open-source platform used by tens of millions of website worldwide. Because it’s so widely used and open source it will never unexpectedly shut down or be discontinued. Unlike what we are now seeing with BC, if WordPress is ever abandoned by its developers, websites that use the platform will remain online and its codebase will continue to function.

BC was a handy all-in-one solution that featured a built-in customer relationship manager (CRM), e-mailing list and eCommerce integration. WordPress, on the other hand, is something that integrates with third-party solutions, making it much more powerful in today’s web.

Harnessing the power of services like Hubspot (CRM), MailChimp (email list marketing) and Google Analytics (website analytics) are invaluable. All are powerful free tools that you can integrate into your website and use to better manage your business and its marketing ongoing.

Nowadays modern websites integrate these service providers because they are specialised. They’re the best service providers in their respective fields. Most built-in options are now considered second-rate.

Can’t I just Copy My Business Catalyst Site Straight Across to WordPress?

It’s currently not possible to cleanly migrate a BC website and its associated data straight into WordPress with one click of a mouse.

Transferring Business Catalyst content to WordPress is not a one-to-one conversion. There’re lots of moving parts that need to be considered when making the switch.

Each aspect of an Adobe Business Catalyst website has to be transferred individually. This is the same issue you would face when considering Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, or any other CMS. Whilst there is no one-click solution for WordPress, it is a relatively straight forward process.

While migrating your BC site may feel daunting, just remember: this is an opportunity to improve upon past work and continue developing your market offering.  You’ve probably grown a lot since you first got your site together.

Given that you’re investing in your website, it’s worth looking to improve your website, rather than just copying over everything exactly as it’s currently displayed.

Use this as an opportunity to grow. Keeping a positive mindset will turn daunting tasks into a brilliant opportunity!

Components of a Business Catalyst To WordPress Migration

Below are components you should consider when migrating your BC site to WordPress.

Blog Posts

Blog posts in BC can easily be migrated using RSS feed.

Potentially, this is one of the simplest parts of a BC to WordPress migration.

All your content and images can be downloaded and then reuploaded to WordPress through a simple process.

First, we download the content from BC. We then upload it into your WordPress site. Finally, we make sure all images are also uploaded into your new WordPress site so they don’t disappear once you shut down your BC site (sadly we’ve seen all too often this final step is not applied 🙁

Custom Pages

Custom pages will most likely have to be rebuilt.

However, some template code, images and text can be migrated over relatively smoothly.

A closer inspection of your current website would be needed to assess what work is required to replicate or rebuild pages in the WordPress environment.

Website style, theme and design

The look and feel of your website can be replicated in WordPress. You can keep the exact look-and-feel of your website if desired.

Alternatively, take the opportunity to upgrade and improve your website’s performance!

Focus on creating websites that users love to use and come back to.

User experience and conversion rate optimisation should always at the top of the agenda.

We’ll be happy to guide you through your options and potential areas where you could improve.

EDMs, E-Mailing Lists, Email Followup Series and Automation

Email lists are straight forward to export and upload onto other platforms.

We recommend using Mailchimp for your email marketing because of its robust and market-leading functionality and performance.

Followup email series and automations will have to be recreated in your platform of choice.

For most, you’ll have all the content and structure ready to go. It should just be a process of re-creating the user journeys and re-uploading the original content.

If you haven’t already got automated email journeys setup for new subscribers, purchasers and leads now’s a great opportunity to set some up.

eCommerce (WooCommerce)

WooCommerce is the leading eCommerce add-on for WordPress.

Migrating your product pages from BC into WooCommerce can be done mostly automatically.

Imagery, content, descriptions, reviews and more can easily be brought across.

Customer data can also be exported and moved.

Accurately and comprehensively cross-mapping of BC fields to WooCommerce fields is the most technical and time-consuming factor here.

Hosting & Domain Registration

For those that don’t already know, web hosting is the storage system where your website data is housed. It’s like the home of your website, where it actually lives ‘in the cloud’.

Websites are hosted, or stored, on special computers called servers. When Internet users view your website, your website’s url points their browser to the relevant parts of your server. This is where the code that’s needed to generate the live page lives. Once connected, the viewer’s browser will get what it needs to do its magic. It will compile all the code and generate the webpage.

One benefit of WordPress is that you are in control of your hosting. Your site is stored where you want. You have total control.

Benefits in cost, security and speed are all made available because of this. Take advantage of it!

Need A Hand?

There’s certainly a lot to consider when transferring a BC site to WordPress.

Hopefully, this article has given you insight into what’s required in making the big switch as smooth as possible.

Perhaps you’ve now been inspired to take this as an opportunity to grow.

If you need a hand assessing what’s required to move your BC site to WordPress we’re here for you.

We’d be happy to take a look and give you a no-obligation complimentary quote and roadmap encompassing all that’s discussed above.

Please do get in touch if you have any questions 🙂

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