NetSuite LightCMS End of Life – Urgent Digital Agency Website Migration Help

NetSuite LightCMS End of Life Confirmed – 31 May 2020.

The recent ‘end-of-life’ announcement released by the LightCMS team has come as a shock to many. LightCMS will continue to run up until May 31, 2020, after which it will officially shut down, taking all the websites housed within its system, down with it. With not much else said, it is possible a re-evaluation of operations deemed it simply wasn’t profitable enough.

The certainty is that many small businesses affected will have to quickly set up a content migration plan onto a more stable CMS system to house their online presence and business. With so many digital solutions available, it can become quite challenging to make the right decision.

Website migration can similarly be likened to moving house; there’s a lot of moving parts to juggle and if not done well, will eat up a lot of your time and resources.  Follow below for a simple 5 step guide from our specialist digital agency team on how we can help you move from A to B, stress free. 

5 Simple Steps to Move from LightCMS Quickly & Securely

1. Choose a more popular and stable CMS platform
2. Re-evaluate your hosting options
3. Back up your website & set-up security
4. Move your content securely & efficiently without downtime
5. Set up all your 301 redirects correctly

Let’s unpack it together

1. Choose a more popular and stable CMS platform

You don’t want to go through this debacle again, so you want to choose something reliable, world-class that will scale with your business. We recommend moving to WordPress, our CMS of choice as we’ve developed many of  our award-winning websites over the last 10+ years with it and watched it grow from strength to strength. Fun fact, did you know WordPress currently powers more than 35% of the web, from small family-owned business websites, all the way up to Fortune 500s web solutions such as Sony Music and Forbes. 

Bottom line, it’s not going anywhere.

Though we stand by our recommendation, our development team also has vast experience in other CMS platforms, so let us know if you want to explore another preference.

Just select and install, and we’re off. 

2. Re-evaluate your hosting options

What’s the logic in building a beautiful house in a bad suburb? Just like your house, you don’t want someone to break into your website. Aside from security issues, bad hosting can also slow down your site speed. So this is a great opportunity to re-evaluate if you’ve had any hosting issues in the past. 

Some of these include 

• really slow site speed
• regularly hacked 
• site is constantly down
• bad customer service (hard to get a hold of)
• you need a more cost-effective solution

If you’re unsure, we have a few hosting partners we’ve worked with over the years that we can recommend (and here’s a hosting company you might want to check out), based on your budget and website needs.

3. Back up your website & set-up security

Once you’ve built the house, it’s generally recommended you add locks and an alarm system to protect what’s inside. Same goes for your website.

As a routine part of all our standard website builds and launches, we follow an in-depth pre-launch checklist to ensure your website is protected against spambots and hackers.

Simply download your files/ images / content and store it away in a safe place. It’s just in case you need to retrieve some old information, unfortunately there’s no undo button once it’s gone.

4. Move your content securely & efficiently

For many, your website is your best salesman so you simply cannot afford for it to be down for a few hours, let alone days. Our content migration process is done local and in-house, on a separate staging website so that there is absolutely no downtime on your live website. On this staging website, you have the ability to give everything a once-over and polish it up to your heart’s content, to ensure everything is pixel-perfect before we hit the launch pad.

We also have a few extra solutions up our sleeve, if you’re time poor. 

5. Set up all your 301 redirects correctly

With any content migration or re-evaluation, there are often new services or products of your business that you’re opening up. Alongside this are the products or pages that are no longer relevant. It is crucial that these are handled properly; if simply deleted or removed, will drain your website of the good SEO juice you have spent years (and thousands of $$$) building up. Google takes this seriously, and we do too.

Websites aren’t just made up of a pretty interface, but many unseen factors that are important in establishing a strong foundation for SEO and marketing capabilities. 

Need a helping hand or two?

If you’ve ever tried moving, sometimes there’s a lot of extra work involved that you don’t initially realise. We don’t have a moving van, but we can deliver your website from one spot to another (safely & securely).

Let us do the heavy lifting for you (and we’ll make sure to tick off all these 5 steps as part of our routine)

With these 5 steps, your website migration plan should be back on track. If you would like to fast-track this process, reach out to our digital team on (03) 9912 6403 ( ask for our director Irwin! ) 

Our design and development team are solely focused on all actions regarding web, starting with custom front-end design, all the way to back-end development and content migration.

Let’s get you settled back in, we’ll keep things light in your new digital suite!