The Oxford Group
Complex website migration for UK leadership organisation
Project overview
In 2023, we worked with award-winning leadership organisation The Oxford Group, to move their website from Drupal to WordPress CMS, adding in design and functionality improvements to further improve their site performance and accessibility.
0.14g
C02 per homepage view
92%
Homepage Lighthouse Accessibility score
0.8s
Page load time
Creating a custom migration script
The Oxford group’s website was previously hosted on Drupal CMS, which the team found difficult to use, and wished to move to the more user-friendly WordPress CMS. The challenge for our team was how to migrate all of the content from the existing website, as we were unable to get access to the server to export this content.
Our developer team began by reviewing the whole website to create a list of all the public facing pages. We then created a custom script, which allowed our team to scrape each page listed, collecting the data required in a structured JSON file. Finally, another script was written to process the JSON files and the data contained in each, to an appropriate place in the new WordPress CMS.
Automating the content migration in this way can be difficult to achieve as there are no obvious routes or plugins that provide easy migration paths.
Our approach reduced a potentially huge job of manually moving content page by page, and these scripts can be replicated, potentially saving time should we have a similar issue in future projects.
Subtle sustainable design upgrades
Although this was a content migration project, essentially copying the existing website across to the new CMS with no changes to the design, we were able to introduce some subtle changes to further improve the performance of the new website.
As we worked through replicating the pages and had to produce blocks on the new WordPress site that existed in the Drupal site, we were able to improve the accessibility and UX of the new website, by introducing small changes to upgrade its design and functionality.
For example, we improved the text/background contrasts, updated some hover states on hyperlinks, and re-worked the layout of some content blocks.
These subtle changes also helped to reduce the carbon footprint of the new site by 78% (from 0.63g to 0.14g C02 per homepage view)!
Wholegrain meticulously crafted a user-friendly WordPress CMS that not only looked great but also functioned flawlessly. Their ability to meet deadlines and deliver projects on time demonstrated their commitment to client satisfaction and we are looking forward to working together to grow our website and increase our traffic.
An ongoing relationship
We developed a strong relationship with The Oxford Group team over the course of this project, and have a contract for ongoing support. Now that this website is delivered, we will continue to work together, and are currently planning a strategy for further website improvements in the near future.
