 All right everybody. I think we're gonna get started. We have I'm one minute early, but people can trickle in as they need to kind of thing Perfect we'll get the lights so a little bit about me. I am a graphic designer from Ottawa, Ontario I'm also a stand-up comedian And it's a passion project. I'm not a professional. So I do indie shows mostly Currently I work for the Canadian Physiotherapy Association as their in-house designer and prior to that I worked for Canadian Internet Registration Authority where I was there in in-house designer as well And that was prior to my role at ideal protein where I mass migrated 1,300 websites from HTML to WordPress which I'm gonna talk to you about today I also co-organize and speak on panel discussions at WordCamp Ottawa, and this is my first solo presentation actually Woohoo! Thanks everybody So I'll get started on what is ideal protein. So it's a weight loss management tool So they currently have 35 clinics across the globe and 1,300 of those clinics bought the approved websites that I worked on So they mainly sell meal replacements Drinks condiments and snacks along with one-on-one coaching and they have an app to set goals and monitor weight loss progress So here's a sample of the old websites on the left-hand side and the new WordPress templates on the right-hand side So when I first started all 1,300 websites were on a legacy content management system built in about 2012 And it caused many issues Glitches and was difficult to mass update The websites as you can see are a very basic six-to-age pages for simplicity sake as we were just a team of two people Working on the websites and maintaining their updates And we were actually a part of the IT team at that time a Custom plug-in was also built To feed leads from each website's contact form into a leads panel through the app that was available to each clinic owner So I'll start with the initial setup you could see on the right-hand side There was a registration form so clinics could submit their website addresses and a custom header image List their web domain emails and these form results linked linked into our Zendesk ticketing system That then emailed us the request And we started off with the six templates that you can see on the left-hand side and I'll talk about some lessons learned from this a Little bit later as well There was also a terms of agreement section that they had to agree to at the bottom of the registration form Which limited the number of updates and the number of pages that they could make per month Because we were a team of only two people There was another form for migrated websites that needed modifications made to their site This form was organized by page type and we most often received requests to add new customer testimonials to each website There was also another basic form Which was a lot more simple and this seemed to be a lot easier for clients So they would most often make their submissions through this very basic form So now I'll talk about the initial setup through WP engine. So we actually set up multi-site So all sites within the multi-site network shared the same core files theme and plugins Updates within the multi-site only had to happen once rather than logging into each individual website We had four pods set up within the WP engine instance and Found that the back end of each pod slowed down when we reached of 350 websites per pod Now we'll move over to the website build process We used a number of plugins, but I'm just going to cover the top plugins that I used So first off multi-site clone duplicator That cloned the initial template including all of the page content short codes settings users and roles. I Also used short coder because most most of the websites have the same content But we use the short coder to adjust elements for things that appeared multiple times in the content This included the email address phone number and clinic names in each instance We also use domain mapping by WPMU dev So that helped me map the website address for each domain as it was finalized The advantage to this plug-in was that it supported HTTP and HTTPS which from my research not all plugins could do So after all that we were all set to start the migration I was eager to get a master list of all of the websites that I needed to work out Only to find out that there actually wasn't a master list Love it. So that was this is good. I'm really excited to go through my challenges with you So challenges. Oh my first off as I mentioned no master list kept up to date anywhere The marketing team had never even seen a clinic website So again, I'll talk more on lessons learned But in the within the company the marketing team was on the second level and the IT team was on the bottom level of the building So logistically we were far away from each other and didn't really speak to each other very often So a huge communication issue which I worked through as well And third off third of all there was no successful strategy in place to communicate with clinic owners to even choose their new template So first off we'll start on the issue of no master list and how how did I even realize this Well, nobody could pull me a list from anywhere So I pulled myself a list from high-rise and I started manually spot-checking the notes and Correspondence with the clinic owners. I found out that there had been requests for the odd website to be cancelled and those websites were indeed still live Which meant that we had we were still paying for hosting for all of these websites I asked more questions and found out that a separate list of even more websites needed to be exported because high-rise did not Include web domains that we didn't own So I got that list as well. I merged everything and essentially prepped it for import to our CRM tool And our CRM tool was at that time just being built By requirements that were provided by the sales team. So the web development team was not consulted at all another communication issue I would say So I did manually check each domain and its status in high-rise and within the finance invoicing tool before importing So the next part of my audit Was to meet with the sales and dev teams. I Found out that over the last year the website team had never been informed of a single website Suspension due to staff turnover So the websites were supposed to be suspended when a clinic hadn't paid their invoicing for three months But there was no communication process happening within the company for that So I then met with the CRM developers and I provided them with proper requirements That included fields for website suspensions and cancellations with date pickers Automated alerts and reporting were set up to notify us of the website statuses every week The client services team was also trained on how to use these new fields Now over to the finance team of course So I asked even more questions and then I got a login to our finance invoicing tool I had to let the finance team know that there were over a hundred outstanding or unpaid invoices That affected the websites. I explained that I didn't know if I should be migrating these websites since they were unpaid The finance team got the invoices resolved within a month through phone calls and A new process was put in place so that they would notify us weekly of clinics that had not paid their invoices in three months And then they started to make calls to follow up So next up was the marketing team. I couldn't believe that the marketing team had never even seen an approved website It was crazy to me So I sat down with them and I walked them through the websites templates and capabilities They had just launched the marketing guidelines And mailed them to each clinic excluding the approved websites This would have been a good opportunity to advertise the new templates that we were just developing But again, they didn't know what the IT team had been building So next up was the strategy after I got all the business process audits and processing in place I was ready to start my own strategy because there wasn't one in place to communicate with these clinic owners So I eblasted 200 clinics per day Advertising the new website features and I included the migration request form Migrations finally started happening and I was able with my setup to do eight migrations per day So very important to talk about the lessons learned here Not to rip on my teammates, but the sales team was not interested in doing anything that didn't make them commission So they weren't even interested in bringing up these websites on the phone because they had already sold a website They already made their commission and the obviously the migrations wasn't going to make them money There was also a business account manager team And they were also not interested in bringing up the websites on their calls because they were commissioned based as well I also learned that having six template options was too many so clinic owners were actually overwhelmed with that selection They often did ask our sales rep to just go ahead and choose a template for them So they didn't have any interest in reviewing the live demos we had set up. So that was strange to me So Not all clinic owners were responsive to the e-blast from MailChimp even after sending it to them three times And even direct calls when I did get people to make these direct calls People weren't like generally the clinic owners weren't that responsive by phone because they meet face-to-face all day with their clients And they're always coaching them through their weight loss program So that was interesting set of challenges that I didn't really expect Now over to the Gutenberg impact So I've been asked to discuss how I would have evaluated this project had it been Had Gutenberg being released prior to the project So if Gutenberg had been released prior to this project, I still would have used Divi as the theme and page builder And I'll go through Divi here So what is Divi? For those of you who haven't heard of it It's a drag-and-drop builder that includes 46 modules to build pages and posts The Divi builder is added to the page editor. Most importantly, it supports global elements For example, we were required the exact same text to be included on different websites and Divi allowed Allowed us to update and deploy the common text as needed which Gutenberg does not yet to my knowledge So what about Gutenberg? I'm sure in your sessions today, you've heard a lot about it It's a new editor for WordPress as you know that lets you build content with blocks It enhances page customization and editing for a basic user And in this instance of the 1300 websites, I set up templates that require minimal content customization For the ease of maintenance of over 1300 sites because we were just a team of two people Each end user could only actually view basic Google analytics when they logged in So the simplicity of the Gutenberg editor would not actually have benefited them So I found this great article on Divi cake comm. I've included the URL there I'm it kind of just lists out the Divi versus Gutenberg pros and cons Again Divi has had a much longer development period whereas Gutenberg is just starting I've also listed here some of the cons of Divi versus Gutenberg Yes Divi cake comm. I do like that that name actually it's quite fun So again Divi isn't free and it does require a premium subscription Which includes access to every theme and plug-in through elegant themes which worked well for our instance because we needed access to those plugins anyway So in conclusion, I really think it depends on your instance and your clients Gutenberg may suit your needs as it evolves only time will tell I always recommend gathering Requirements and doing research and testing before starting any mass project like this I'd like to thank our organizers again for putting this together today for us as well as our sponsors And then I'd like to ask you guys if you have any questions So we would log in so we had those three separate pods and It's very complicated to explain via via slides or verbally But we actually use that clone duplicator plug-in that I covered and we would actually just clone One of our templates and customize with those shortcode plug-in So those three base plugins that I listed out which I can't go back to if you'd like those were key in Basically doing that so they had common content No, so we actually had approved content and most of it was a listing of our products and things like that so it was canned Content so basically we just cloned all of that existing content Yep So we didn't have a lot of success Because again those clinic owners are meeting face-to-face with their customers all day, so it's hard to even get Yeah Yeah Mm-hmm It's true They were more responsive to our sales rep again calling and mentioning it and then they would even just ask our sales rep to fill out The form on their behalf so that was interesting actually it was worth a try I would say like maybe 25% of people filled out forms Correct, yeah Exactly, and that's taking into consideration that people didn't necessarily read or click the email Yeah, for sure it's interesting Yeah, so from the top the CEO actually ran another business and he was never present in the office So that's a huge roadblock and lesson learned that I don't want to address too much. Yes, exactly I had never actually met him during my time there or seen him even walk by my desk. So that was part of the issue Yes, exactly, it's so true It's a yeah Yeah, there's small business owners that purchase our product and resell it essentially Yeah, so that's mainly how I clone them all one by one. So yeah, they're essentially the same content Yeah, I mean they had social media presence as well, but it was the only website presence So that there was no bottlenecks that was actually full capacity so it did take me one hour to complete one website So it was about an eight-hour workday and one site per hour type of thing Yeah, I mean they are only six pages and again, they work hand content So it was just through the shortcoder that we customized those few fields type of thing It was often the domain mapping actually Yeah, so especially the secured HTTPS so and waiting for all of that to to work So that is through WP engine So we had the three separate pods and I believe that is server instances through WP engine And again, I'm not really like a server expert type of thing So I would consult them and I'm sure if we did have a more resources We could have optimized the load time and the server runtime to kind of Have more than the 350 website They were separate multi-site instances. Yeah, so 350 Three pods. Yes, correct Yeah Yes Okay So I would have wanted them to know that we're working on it But I would have wanted them to know I guess a lot of the new benefits of those new websites And the ease of updates the modernized content and I guess the Google analytics availability for those clinic owners would have been the top three features that we would have wanted So I guess they could have just aided us in distributing the knowledge through those marketing guidelines that they had set sent out they could have listed the pros and Basically put a call to action in those marketing guidelines like choose your template today with that URL for the migration request form Yeah, so that would have been very helpful anything else So it was a one-year project Yes, I did move on after that Yeah No, not quite but my colleague is still there maintaining the websites actually so it is a full-time job still even though We set it up within WordPress. There's just always changes Clinics are changing their addresses their names their phone numbers Etc. So that is still a full-time role for him even with our our rock solid instance that we set up so Yeah With this company Yes Yes Yeah, I taught them how to pull their own reporting from their own finance tool So it's just I think it's a great lesson for everybody because you can get hired as a content creator web designer or developer And get told to run at a project But it's really good to take a step back actually and look at the whole process Beforehand because I'd like built all of these templates and been told to run at something that I said We're not even in a place to start this. So yeah, so I think that's a key takeaway from this whole talk Which was very interesting actually for sure Yes Yeah, exactly for sure That was a server issue through WP engine And I mean it only ran slow on the back end when we were logged into each website when it did reach 350 websites So from a front-end standpoint, it was still running quickly Yeah, and that's something if we had more resources like a web developer then they could optimize the code If we had a server specialist, they could have also looked at that for us But again only a team of two people working on it So and we had to get them done within a certain time period. So we kept running at it Of No, not exactly so it's 350 websites on the back end of each pod type of thing, so I'm not sure Oh, so there is three multi sites with yes, yes We were advised to do that by WP engine my co-worker at the time didn't want to go that route. I'm not sure why So I escalated it to my manager and you know my manager would talk to them about it And then I would also I guess check the notes in high-rise and see that they weren't mentioning it on their calls And actually I had to rat them out basically because I couldn't do my job unless they did So yeah, it's interesting You think you're with a team and then you can realize you're very quickly not and people are just there to make money Which is a good point on running a business that is a commission-based you actually will I don't know things will fall apart and grow old and the web presence is very important Yes Yes for sure so I did find that as a graphic designer in my previous role It was getting I was getting caught up in numbers of revisions on the same project So then I wanted a change And the change was to go and try more of a web-based design, but I did find that that was a bit too repetitive But when I look back on it I did learn a lot from the business process standpoint And I did network and meet a lot of people who will then provide me with a lot of opportunities going forward knowing the Audit and how thorough it was which I did for that company So I think it's open doors for me from the business analysis standpoint But I think at the end of the day graphic design is still my passion But it was still a good lesson learned to never like run at any web design or development Project without taking a step back and asking more questions. So it's a very interchangeable skill for sure Yes So that's a good question each clinic actually did have their own logo and branding So yeah, so they did want a slightly different look for sure But again, they they did find that six was too many options It seemed like they didn't want to think about it at all which was strange to me So yeah, I'm not sure what the best Um Well, I guess originally it seemed like in 2002 or 2006 when they first built the original website templates They had given them hundreds of options like they advertised it as like choose from 150 different templates So I guess we were trying to tighten that up with the six different options And then I guess the web in general has evolved and changed where you know marketing that as 150 options is no longer a Good idea and probably we grew as a company and the clinics are so far apart globally That it doesn't really matter as much that they look have a different look and feel So yeah Yeah, so often I would crop logos And we did have our templates set up so that we could choose an accent color which would populate the hovers It would populate the hyperlink So basically we would just we had it set up so that we could pull their one accent color And put it throughout the website pretty quickly Yeah, we did we did put a certain width and Hight it didn't matter as much because I would crop it Yeah, and then otherwise sometimes they have no graphic skills So I would have to inverse their logo if I needed to type of thing Yeah, I'm pretty quick like it was an idol for Julia just like boom boom boom done But not not every day was eight per day. I would say six to eight is the most accurate depending on the the instance Yeah for sure Yeah Yeah, I was using Divi So I'm trying to So you're asking how it basically it worked flawlessly I never had any glitches using Divi within it. So again, literally I just Cloned it worked with work right within the Divi Instance and again, we had global elements So we would change it once in the master template and then deploy that to all 350 templates and we never ran into any issue We just had to keep that page open and we could see the progress on each website And it would kind of show a check mark as we did it. So so yeah, no glitches from what I experienced The speed on the back end was was slow again as I mentioned but on the front end it was pretty optimal I think just having initial stable templates set up and a lot of testing done of the clone duplicators and the plugins and testing for I guess any conflicts I so yeah again testing at the end of the day is the most critical component to all of that Yeah, I did list the three plugins that were most important to me So the clone duplicator the short coder as I mentioned I can't think of anything offhand that was absolutely critical other than those top three I felt they were most important. So that's why I kind of flagged them. Yeah. Yeah, no problem. Yes Sorry, I missed that last part No, so the clone duplicator plugged all it cloned all of the plugins and settings and users and roles. So Yeah, so it's great. So my colleague and I were automatically admins on on this every site that we cloned No, we didn't experience that Yeah, not not at all actually and so it was really neat because we could actually just update the plugins at the top level We never had to do it on each individual site Yeah, you may not want to answer this question. That's okay. Ideal poking is a company. I've never heard of it someplace with 1300 Like presences and so on and I'm wondering how this migration impacted their exposure or their How they were perceived as a company. I don't know how many other people have heard of ideal protein. I haven't yeah I'm just wondering also like does it help to do this kind of a migration for somebody who's got 1300 sites. Yeah, so that's a very good question So the marketing team did have an SEO specialist who was Measuring the success and I guess they could buy additional packages For a certain price to add on like Google ads and services like that So he would have been the person within the company kind of tracking that but because I just migrated them and then moved on I actually haven't talked to them to know what the results were but that is a very good question actually And again because our CMS was custom built before I don't imagine It had very good SEO at all for those clinics because it was built way back when right and SEO evolves as we know like every day So yeah, so I imagine it still did benefit them, but he would have been the one measuring the success Yes There was a contact form that was interactive and there was a Custom plug-in was built to feed those leads right into our app for the clinic owners to then get those leads So it wasn't necessarily Yes, exactly and to modernize the look of the websites there was a number of reasons Trying to think of what else just yeah Everything you could think of really I mean like if we needed to mass update a word or content or anything We couldn't do that on our old system. I don't even think it was supporting special characters So yeah, it was pretty crazy that instance Yes, yeah, so that's an interesting question. I would say I am such an introverted designer and as most developers My people are it is just totally a random thing that I do stand-up comedy It does not tie in at all and comedy is a certain persona That I try to keep separate from my work life And I've invited my co-workers to come and see my comedy and gone quite some Interesting faces and reactions during So I yeah, so keeping I guess comp comedic life and professional life separate is probably a good thing Yeah, for sure because it's yeah, it's interesting how it's received I guess by co-workers Yeah Any more questions? Yes Oh No, so the main site was managed by the marketing team there is a clinic locator at least there was when I was looking when I was working there Yeah Okay Yeah, and then you can type in your postal code and see all of those locations regionally populate The app was an iPad and iPhone app as far as I know and I didn't work on that Actually, I just made I just worked briefly with the developers to test my templates to make sure those leads would populate With them type of thing and obviously added the plug-in to the sites, but yeah, I didn't build that at all was It was a WordPress plug-in that was custom-built I would just say page load time so that's probably a divi It's it was within the divi editor that we would see slow response time and and for the when we clicked edit for something to open up It would just take a long time No pages like you could click them and load them no problem And I mean WP engine has caching and all sorts of things like that that made it load quickly on the front end But Yeah, so we were starting to build a French language templates So I don't my colleague was in charge of the French language as I was doing tackling the English ones So so I'm not that familiar with his approach No, not not at that time Experience would be that it's by the field side Correct, yes. All right any more questions that was great lots of questions, which is always good. It's probably longer than my actual presentation