THE BACKGROUND

Essence, one of the leading magazines for African-American women, had recently gone independent, and they needed to migrate their website to a new platform. Their site contained over 70,000 pages on a proprietary CMS from their former parent company.

THE BACKGROUND

THE CHALLENGE

Essence had numerous challenges and goals
to face:

They needed some UX/UI optimizations to improve critical conversion paths that weren’t performing as well as they should.
They no longer had access to their previous CMS, including the templates, pages and other assets.
Their SEO was strong, so it was critical that the migration was seamless and maintained their stellar SEO practices.
Their previous CMS made it difficult to manage the website for marketers and other non-developers.

CXR Agency felt comfortable finding a solid solution for each challenge, so we jumped right in.

THE CHALLENGE

FEATURES + PROCESS

Improving the UX/UI

CXR Agency was not given access to the parent company’s CMS, so we started by recreating their existing design elements. During this process, our design engineers scoured the site for areas to improve. We uncovered several issues with key conversion paths and quickly implemented new designs to ensure a clearer path for conversion.

Migrating 70,000 pages seamlessly

The next challenge was to migrate their massive site seamlessly. Since we did not have access to their legacy CRM, we created script that would capture the content from their site and transplant it into the new CMS and design.

Maintaining SEO

It was critical that we maintained the earned SEO Essence had generated over the years. Our script ensured all URLs and structured data like headlines and image alt tags carried over into the new site.

Making the site easier to edit

The last thing we delivered were CMS customizations to ensure the Essence team could easily edit and create content for their new site. We created several custom widgets so they could include complex elements on the page without help from developers.

FEATURES + PROCESS

RESULT: A SEAMLESS MIGRATION TO A MORE EDITABLE WEBSITE

The migration went off without a hitch. There was no downtime for the website, no issues of corrupted or missing data and no SEO value lost from the migration. The Essence team saw improvements in their conversion paths and continues to work with CXR Agency for other projects.