Empowering Content Management for JD Wetherspoon with WordPress

Discover how Filter successfully transitioned the JD Wetherspoon website from Sitecore to WordPress, enhancing their content management and site performance.

Migration from Sitecore to WordPress

As the long-term digital partner of JD Wetherspoon, we have supported their online initiatives through various changes and upgrades. Their website, which had been built on Sitecore and launched in 2015, was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and no longer met their needs.

To address this, we were tasked with migrating their site to WordPress. This strategic shift was intended to create a more user-friendly and flexible content management system, enhance the site’s overall design and support future growth.

Approach & Technology

Our experienced team recommended introducing WordPress Multisite to manage the various sites of JD Wetherspoon, including their hotel, career and investor portals. This approach allowed for the use of a unified theme, blocks, plugins and user management across all sites.

Our process started with detailed planning and UX/UI design phases, collaborating closely with the JD Wetherspoon marketing team. We created new mobile-optimised templates and developed custom blocks and patterns using the WordPress Block Editor. Significant changes were made to the information architecture and user experience to simplify navigation and enhance the marketing of promotions and events.

To bolster security and operational efficiency, critical site components such as pub data, menus, and allergen information were transitioned to microservices and seamlessly integrated into the CMS, enabling the marketing team to concentrate on content creation and dissemination.

Personalisation

As part of this project, we implemented our innovative WordPress personalisation plugin, PersonalizeWP, to deliver more relevant content. This powerful tool allowed us to dynamically promote various items and menus based on different days of the week and specific times of day. For example, if a customer visits on a Tuesday they will be shown content relating to their Steak Club where visitors can get a particular discount after 11:30 am.

By opting to use the Pro version of PersonalizeWP, the JD Wetherspoon team can monitor visitor activity and segment users according to their behaviours and interests. Segmenting their audience into focused groups will enable them to offer highly targeted content and promotions, significantly improving engagement and customer satisfaction. This provides each visitor with a fully customised experience, tailored to their needs and preferences.

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Challenges

One of the primary challenges involved migrating a significant volume of content from Sitecore to WordPress. This content required post-export refactoring to ensure compatibility with the WordPress database and smooth integration with the block editor.

Preserving search performance amid shifts in information architecture and user experience was crucial. This required extensive efforts in implementing redirects, optimising sitemaps and enhancing SEO performance to ensure a fluid transition without compromising search rankings.

Outcomes

Consolidating the JD Wetherspoon external websites onto a single WordPress platform has delivered significant benefits. The marketing team now enjoys economies of scale in content management and editing. The site redesign and development have also positively impacted search performance, resulting in increased visits and greater use of the pub search feature.

Additionally, the development of custom blocks has improved Core Web Vitals and site speed rankings, enhancing user engagement, particularly on mobile devices. The Block Editor has empowered the JD Wetherspoon marketing team with full control over all site pages, enabling them to quickly create new landing pages for marketing campaigns.

Summary

Filter’s successful migration of the JD Wetherspoon website from Sitecore to WordPress has provided a more flexible and user-friendly platform for their marketing team. This project underscores our expertise in migrating businesses from platforms like Sitecore, Umbraco or Drupal to WordPress, ensuring seamless content migration and retention of search presence.

This project highlights our expertise in building dynamic, efficient and high performing websites. Our successful collaborations with clients like Medivet Careers and our other projects for JD Wetherspoon (such as their Careers and Hotels websites) showcase our capability to deliver tailored solutions that meet specific business needs.

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