Content-wise, the legendary non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation wasn’t feeling it. Two decades’ worth of legacy data, scattered across no less than 10 separate data sources, including two content management systems, bottlenecked their staff. 

Publishing new content online? It was a broken workflow. “The [content] staff didn’t touch the CMS,” explains KFF Vice President David Rousseau. “They wrote things in Word, sent it to the production team, and they put it online.”

KFF had had enough. They needed a new, intuitive, and flexible platform that would unify all their legacy content, publications, and sites. And a platform that would democratize publishing—bringing direct control to content creators. 

The Rx was:

• Migrate everything.
• Move off Sitecore and Commonspot CMSes.
• Adopt WordPress VIP, a single digital platform and infrastructure. 

The cure was dramatic:

“With WordPress, [our] workflow is changing dramatically,” says David. “We’ve trained many of our content creators in the CMS. And, the closer the content creators are to it, the more creatively they are able to think about it.”

KFF learned that not all content management systems are the same. Let’s take a deeper look at the limitations of one—Sitecore—and why migrating to WordPress VIP is a healthy move.

Table of contents

• WordPress VIP makes content creation easy 
• Speed content creation and development 
• Get flexibility to meet future CMS needs
• Scale content engine with a modern solution
• Enjoy a higher level of support
• Migrate to a healthier platform

Powered by WordPress, the open CMS standard, WordPress VIP makes content creation easy for your whole organization—today and tomorrow

Legacy content management systems like Sitecore with bloated, monolithic architectures, unintuitive tools, and a limited pool of developers, aren’t up for the challenge of today’s modern digital world.

On the other hand, WordPress VIP delivers a broad ecosystem of technical solutions, agencies, and developers, a more open solution, and more intuitive tools for content creation and measurement.

With WordPress VIP, marketing teams can keep up with the pace of content innovation. Let’s explore why. And why Sitecore can’t.

Speed content creation and development with the CMS your team probably already knows—without being blocked by IT

Every piece of Sitecore is complex. 

From its development tooling to its content creation tools, it’s often difficult for stakeholders to be successful without extensive training. As a result, many Sitecore deployments end up becoming reliant on a limited set of IT staff. 

WordPress VIP is much more intuitive. 

Here are three reasons why and the benefits of each.

1. Content creation made easy

Sitecore’s editorial user experience is clunky and inefficient. 

In contrast, the WordPress block editor gets content creators using WordPress VIP with almost no training. And because WordPress is so widely used, it’s likely a new content creator will already be familiar with the editor.

2. Changes without IT support

With Sitecore, even small changes to content or layout can require IT involvement. 

WordPress VIP organizes content around simple, modular blocks that can be used across channels. If more changes are needed, full-site editing allows mere mortals to make those changes with ease.

3. Analytics you can actually use

Sitecore’s analytics are difficult to use and limited to traditional (and misleading) page view-based analytics. 

With real-time feedback from built-in Parse.ly analytics, WordPress VIP easily helps your whole content team understand how content is driving real engagement and conversions across channels.

Content creation for all: With WordPress VIP, even non-technical teams at KFF can now create, edit, and publish data, which helps improve efficiency and online innovation.

Get flexibility to meet your future CMS needs in a fraction of the time and cost—without limiting your choices

WordPress, the open standard, powers more than 40% of the web today. Sitecore powers less than 2% of it. 

With a community of thousands of contributors and a massive pool of developers, WordPress stands apart. 

Here are three reasons why and the benefits of each.

1. Off-the-shelf solutions

Sitecore customers struggle with the cost and complexity of development work. 

On the other hand, WordPress VIP offers access to the widest range of plugins, themes, and integrations (tens of thousands), eliminating the developer overhead that plagues Sitecore deployments.

2. Access to more developers

Not everything can be solved off-the-shelf.

Unfortunately, Sitecore is a niche solution with limited adoption and scarce developers, leaving organizations struggling to find talent. With WordPress VIP, you unlock a massive, worldwide talent pool of skilled, dedicated WordPress developers.

3. Access to innovation

New technologies become available for WordPress first. 

For example, when Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Facebook launched Instant Articles, WordPress was the only CMS they supported on day one. In short, WordPress VIP customers get priority access.

Migration challenge solved: Content-type complexity was the biggest issue to overcome for KFF—consolidating KFF’s legacy sites and content management tools surfaced a total of 37 custom post types, 18 custom taxonomies, and 300 custom fields. WordPress VIP didn’t flinch at the task. 

Scale your content engine with a modern solution, not CMS clutter—without straitjacketing your teams

In recent years, Sitecore has tried to address architectural gaps by adopting a new cloud-native set of solutions—some developed in-house, some via acquisition. 

The replatforming has been painful for many customers. WordPress VIP delivers a more modern, modular, open, and cloud-based solution. 

Here are three reasons why and the benefits of each.

1. Simple, modular flexibility

WordPress VIP is designed with modularity in mind, integrating seamlessly with other solutions. 

In this way, it operates well in a best-of-breed environment. In contrast, Sitecore is a monolith designed to lock customers into their own solutions.

2. Built for today’s scale

Sitecore was built for an older era. 

Today the scale of digital is greater than it ever has been. WordPress VIP is designed to scale to billions. On Election Night 2020, when FiveThirtyEight was hit with more than a billion requests, WordPress VIP didn’t miss a beat. 

3. Freedom to switch

Because WordPress VIP is built on WordPress and open standards, it’s easy to change out your support or architectural infrastructure.

Sitecore lacks this flexibility, leaving customers high and dry when they fail to keep pace with the market.

Finding a way: KFF was able to build an extensive, faceted search engine with Elasticsearch on top of WordPress to deliver the right content at the right time.

Enjoy a higher level of support from dedicated WordPress experts

Many customers find Sitecore’s overall support experience (which relies heavily on partners) lacking. 

As their architecture has changed and partner enablement lagged, Sitecore and its customers struggle to get the most basic questions answered.

From the very first level of support, WordPress VIP provides comprehensive expertise from the foremost experts on WordPress, recognized by industry-leading customer satisfaction.

Migrate to a healthier, more open, more intuitive, more innovative, better supported platform—WordPress VIP

Domains and URLs. Plugins and integrations. Format and functionality. Moving all that content. 

On the face of it, migrating an enterprise website to a more efficient, more secure, and more scalable CMS like WordPress VIP sounds daunting. Maybe even scary. But it doesn’t have to be.

And consider the payoff: faster and smarter content creation, your development team freed from mundane platform maintenance, a better digital experience for customers. 

Learn what’s involved with our website migration guide and checklist. And take inspiration from other brands who made the jump to WordPress VIP, like Al Jazeera, Capgemini, News UK, and Salesforce. 

Or cut to the chase and ask for a WordPress VIP demo.