Jekyll has become a popular platform for developers who value simplicity, speed, and static site generation. However, for businesses seeking more scalability, user-friendly content management, and enhanced functionality, WordPress emerges as the superior choice.
If you’re contemplating migrating your Jekyll website to WordPress, this guide compares the two platforms and highlight the reasons why WordPress could be the better fit for your business needs.
Jekyll vs. WordPress
Ease of Use
- Jekyll: Jekyll requires coding knowledge and a local development environment. Content is managed through Markdown files and version control, which is ideal for developers but daunting and impractical for non-technical users.
- WordPress: WordPress features a user-friendly interface with intuitive dashboards, drag-and-drop builders, and straightforward content editing. It’s accessible to beginners and advanced users alike.
Scalability and Customisation
- Jekyll: Customisation in Jekyll relies heavily on coding. While it’s lightweight and fast, adding new features can be complex and time-consuming and require longer lead times.
- WordPress: WordPress offers thousands of themes and plugins, enabling users to easily expand functionality, from eCommerce to SEO tools. The flexibility allows your website to grow with your business.
Maintenance and Updates
- Jekyll: Updating a Jekyll site requires technical expertise and can involve manual processes. Ongoing maintenance typically falls to the developer or technical team to manage.
- WordPress: WordPress simplifies updates with built-in notifications for core updates, plugins, and themes. Managed hosting options can also help automate maintenance tasks.
SEO and Marketing
- Jekyll: While Jekyll sites can be optimised for SEO, it requires custom coding and manual configuration.
- WordPress: WordPress excels in SEO with plugins like Yoast SEO, which guide users through optimising their site for search engines. Its ecosystem supports integrated marketing tools for email campaigns, analytics, and more.
Why migrate your Jekyll website to WordPress?
Broader Accessibility
WordPress is designed to be user-friendly, allowing anyone from solo entrepreneurs to large teams to manage their website without relying on a developer. For organisations with non-technical stakeholders, this ease of use is invaluable.
Enhanced Functionality
With almost 60,000 plugins available, WordPress allows you to add features like contact forms, eCommerce functionality, membership portals, LMS, and multilingual support in a matter of clicks. This level of functionality is harder to achieve in Jekyll without extensive coding and development.
Dynamic Content Management
While Jekyll is ideal for static websites, today, businesses often need dynamic content capabilities, like blogs, event calendars, online stores, or user-generated content. WordPress’s CMS architecture is perfectly suited for these use cases.
SEO and Digital Marketing Support
WordPress is built with SEO in mind, offering clean code and numerous plugins to optimise meta tags, sitemaps, and keyword targeting. It integrates seamlessly with other marketing tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Mailchimp, which can be more challenging to implement on Jekyll.
Cost-Effective Development and Maintenance
The large WordPress developer community ensures competitive pricing for customisation and support services. Additionally, there are many hosting providers that offer tailored WordPress solutions, making it a more cost-effective option compared to maintaining a static Jekyll setup.
Why hire a specialist when migrating a website from Jekyll to WordPress?
Hiring a WordPress specialist such as CircleBC can be beneficial for a business that wants to migrate from Jekyll to WordPress for several reasons:
Technical Expertise: A WordPress specialist has the technical expertise to ensure a smooth migration process. They can help with the export of content, installation, and setup of WordPress, importing content, customisation, testing and deployment of your new website, and troubleshooting any issues that may arise.
Optimisation: They can help with the optimisation of your website for search engines and performance, making sure that your new WordPress website is technically sound and ready for launch.
Customisation: They can help customise your website to match your business’s specific design and functionality requirements.
Integrations: They can help with the integration of third-party tools and services that are needed to match or enhance the functionality of your previous website.
Redirects: They can help with the setup of redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs, to maintain the SEO and prevent any 404 errors.
Training: They can provide training on how to use and maintain your new website, ensuring that your staff is comfortable with the new platform.
Support: They can provide ongoing support and maintenance for your website, which can be beneficial for businesses that don’t have the resources or technical expertise to handle these tasks in-house.
Moving to a different CMS can be daunting, especially when you’re not familiar with the new platform, however choosing the right support partner can make the entire process much easier and ensure that your transition is a success.
CircleBC are WordPress experts and can easily help you with the seamless transition from Jekyll to WordPress as well as providing ongoing support and maintenance long after your WordPress site has gone live.
Whether you want to simply migrate your content and layout from Jekyll over to WordPress, or want to undertake an entire redesign, we’ve got you covered!
We can also help you with setting up the following:
- Website hosting
- Email hosting and migration
- Custom data migration
- Custom eCommerce functionality and third-party integrations
- Documentation and training on how to manage your new WordPress website
Migrating from Jekyll to WordPress can empower your business with greater flexibility, ease of use, and access to a robust ecosystem of tools and resources. While Jekyll’s simplicity appeals to developers, WordPress’s ability to cater to diverse user needs makes it the go-to platform for businesses aiming to grow and adapt and have more control over the day to day operations of their website.
If you are looking to migrate your website from Jekyll to WordPress, and you don’t have the inhouse resources to complete the migration for you, we can manage the process end to end. Our team of WordPress experts will ensure that your conversion is done correctly, quickly, and efficiently, and that your website is working properly on the new platform. We can also provide the peace of mind that your website will be secure and that you have ongoing WordPress support when you need it.
CircleBC have helped businesses across Australia, including Sydney,
Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra, Hobart, and Darwin with their WordPress website development and support.
Give the team at CircleBC a call, the initial consultation is complimentary and obligation free 1300 978 073.