Are you ready to migrate from WordPress to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)?

When you established an online presence for your business, you had to make many decisions. And one of the first decisions you had to make involved choosing your website software.

In the early days of a business, you can choose WordPress (provided by Automattic) as a safe choice.

  • WordPress is inexpensive. If you wish, you can even set up an entire website for free (excluding hosting costs).
  • WordPress is easy to use. In some cases you can “design” the website yourself without hiring an expensive consultant by choosing one of the many available themes for WordPress.
  • Many third parties provide functionality additions (plugins) for WordPress. Because of its popularity as a platform, WordPress boasts approximately 60,000 plugins to augment its base functionality.

WordPress brings your business online.

But what if your business grows? Can WordPress support a growing business?

WordPress limitations

While WordPress is a cheap and easy-to-use tool, it buckles under the increased demands of a growing business.

  • WordPress is an overgrown blog, not a true content management system (CMS). WordPress’ legacy as a blogging tool persists even as it now boasts website building capabilities. While the Gutenberg Block Editor has improved WordPress’ page building by exposing over 50 types of blocks you can use in a WordPress website, it is still clunky to use and limited in functionality compared to page builders from third parties.
  • WordPress depends on third-party themes. When you create a WordPress site, you can select from over 11,000 free themes designed by other people. Many other websites may use the exact same theme. Some themes can be modified for your firm’s branding, but this is not a user-friendly task.
  • WordPress depends on third-party plugins. Much of the functionality in a WordPress site is provided by the site’s plugins, which usually are not authored by Automattic, but by third parties. As you select the plugins to include on your website, you must ensure that all the plugins work well together. If they don’t, prepare for fingerpointing between multiple plugin developers and Automattic.
  • WordPress offers minimal digital asset management (DAM) capabilities. While WordPress can store images, videos, and documents, it cannot manage them intelligently—unless you acquire one of the many plugins that offer DAM functionality. Even then, you must ensure that the plugin you choose can intelligently manage the thousands of assets of a growing business.

Overcoming WordPress limitations

With the wrong content management system/digital asset management system, you cannot offer omnichannel, personalized, rapidly-deployable experiences to your prospects and customers.

Some small businesses will never encounter the limitations of WordPress. However, growing businesses often find themselves fighting WordPress’ problems, spending inordinate amounts of time trying to tweak their sites, and ultimately suffering frustration. Growing firms with WordPress sites suffer from a lack of control over how their websites are presented to their prospects and customers.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is the answer

If you are frustrated by WordPress’ limitations and its dependence upon third parties for basic functionality such as asset management, perhaps you’re ready for a more mature platform, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).

  • Adobe is the single author of AEM. Unlike the WordPress ecosystem, where the base product, plugins, themes, and other components are authored by a multitude of companies, Adobe provides all the necessary functionlity, including website management, digital asset management, and even asset creation.
  • AEM and companion Adobe products meet the demanding needs of growing businesses. Unlike WordPress, AEM is both a true content management system (CMS) and digital asset management (DAM) system. As described in other articles on the KBWEB Consult website, each of the AEM offerings—AEM Sites (CMS), AEM Assets (DAM), AEM Forms, and related technologies such as Adobe Edge Delivery Services, Adobe Firefly, AEM Dynamic Media, Adobe Workfront, Adobe Sensei GenAI, and Adobe Analytics —work together, and also work with other Adobe offerings such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe Illustrator. Each of these Adobe offerings fulfillsits particular function; AEM Assets, for example, is an industry-leading digital asset management system, and Adobe Sensei GenAI incorporates the latest generative artificial intelligence capabilities to simplify your marketing and increase your project velocity.
  • AEM and companion Adobe products work together seamlessly. At the same time, they all intelligently work together, so that an Adobe Illustrator creator can store and manage content in AEM Assets without ever leaving Illustrator.

AEM allows your business to grow and removes the frustrations from trying to grow a business on WordPress.

But what about the expense?

Cutting costs doesn’t increase revenue

Many people chose WordPress in the first place because it is much less expensive than Adobe. If you measure a WordPress vs. AEM implementation by costs alone, then it is undeniably true that WordPress is cheaper than AEM. However, a cheap solution can hamper your business growth.

What happens when you spend the money on a well-designed robust solution such as AEM? Adobe asked Forrester Consulting to survey 434 AEM-savvy decision-makers to measure the return on investment (ROI) from implementing AEM. Here is what Forrester found:

  • 1.9x higher customer retention rates
  • 2.1x customer lifetime value
  • 1.5x more very satisfied employees
  • 1.7x revenue growth

Superior business performance improves across every aspect of the customer lifecycle, including greater cost efficiency, heightened employee satisfaction and productivity, and increased customer engagement.

From Great experiences improve your ROI — every time.

For more information, see the Forrester session or read the case study from Helly Hansen (+40% overall e-commerce revenue).

But what about ease of implementation?

An AEM solution is more difficult to implement than a WordPress solution—but that’s where KBWEB Consult can help.

A successful AEM implementation requires careful planning, with representation from all key stakeholders, to ensure that the final implementation addresses all of your critical needs.

  • This includes a complete study of your existing WordPress site and all its plugins to determine what your current site can or cannot do, and how an AEM-powered website can do these things better and provide new possibilities for corporate growth.
  • After the study, you perform a carefully-planned migration from WordPress to AEM, with proper configuration, testing, and feedback.

A properly planned and executed project increases your company’s future revenue and guarantees a rapid return on investment. To ensure a superior implementation, you need to work with an Adobe Certified Partner such as KBWEB Consult.

Are you ready to remove the WordPress shackles and allow your business to grow? If so, schedule a free, confidential 30-minute consultation with KBWEB Consult. You can book a meeting on our Let’s Talk page.