LightCMS End of Life Resource Center
We’re compiling resources and information to help during your migration from LightCMS to SiteWild.
LightCMS goes offline in...
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Client communication
Answers to client FAQs
Why is LightCMS going away?
LightCMS was acquired by Oracle as a part of a deal that involved LightCMS’s parent company. We do not have full insight into Oracle’s decision to sunset the product, but in general Oracle caters to larger, enterprise customers and I believe the LightCMS service simply does not fit well into Oracle’s product portfolio.
Why did you build my website on LightCMS? Why didn't you use another system?
We know operating a wesite is a daunting task, so one of our primary goals is to deliver a site that you’re proud to own. When we built your existing site, we found that LightCMS was a perfect mix of usability, featureset, and overall provided our clients with the best website ownership experience possible.
The future of a content management platform – or of any product, for that matter – is owed to a series of market circumstances that are ultimately impossible to predict.
How do I know this won't happen again with the new site you're building me?
We’ve learned a lot from this experience and have have chosen to create our future website builds on a hosted website platform that’s based on WordPress and other open source or freely available technologies. The new solution enables us to deliver the same amazing website ownership experience you had on LightCMS but without the vendor lock-in we’re experiencing with your current site.
The new platform has a number of other benefits that will allow us to build a more fully-featured, SEO-optimized, and SSL-secured site, but one of our chief considerations is that your site can be exported to a standalone WordPress installation in the future should that ever become necessary.
Will migrating my site screw up existing SEO?
No. We’re working with our new platform vendor to ensure your site URLs, technical site architecture, and SEO metadata are exactly the same or better. In cases where the same URLs can’t be achieved due to system limitations, 301 redirects will be used to maintain SEO by instructing Google and Bing where to find the relocated content.
I want to build my new site in Wix/Weebly/Squarespace/etc.
You (or we) can certainly do this, but the new site will suffer from the same problem that plagued LightCMS – there is no upgrade path for leaving the platform should you ever need to.
I firmly believe that our new WordPress-based platform is the only way to ensure that you’ll never run into this situation again.
I've used WordPress before and I hate it. I don't want to use it for my new site.
Out of the box, WordPress is a bit of a dumpster fire. Adding to the confusion is that most people’s first experience with the system is via a site that was poorly built by an inexperienced developer who hacked together dozens of plugins to create a psuedo-functioning site, likely powered by a slow shared website host.
Though the core underlying architecture is the same, our WordPress-based platform is of an entirely different breed. The carefully-optimized solution features 100% visual front-end content editing (meaning you never have to visit a confusing backend admin dashboard) and the technical archecture as well as the front-end performance are optimized to deliver a WordPress experience unlike anything you’ve seen before.
Email templates
Important information about your website
Hi NAME!
I’m reaching out today with some unfortunate news about the hosted website platform that powers your site.
The content management system (CMS) provider has announced that they’ll be shutting down the service, and they’ve given us a very short timeframe for migrating sites off of the platform.
Because of the way the existing website platform works, we can’t simply move your site to another webhost. Instead we’ll have to manually rebuild your site on a more modern, future-focused solution.
The good news, however, is we already have a partnership with a new provider and are ready to discuss the strategy for migrating your site ASAP.
We’ve intentionally chosen this new solution for the fact that it gives us an upgrade/export path should we ever find ourselves in the same unfortunate position. In addition, it provides a number of functionality and security enhancements that were sorely missing from the current CMS.
I’ll keep this brief for now, but I’m sure you have lots of questions about the next steps. I’m happy to answer them all. Let’s hop on a call this week to discuss:
SCHEDULING LINK OR LIST OF TIMES FOR CONSULTATION
Thanks for your time, I look forward to chatting with you soon!
WEBSITENAME website
Hi NAME!
I’m reaching out because we recently received word that the software vendor we use for your website platform is discontinuing service in 6 months.
We’ll need to get you migrated to our new (much improved) solution soon and wanted to touch base with you to see if you would prefer to move the site as-is or if you are interested in taking this as an opportunity to pursue a redesign of the site.
Since we’ll be migrating existing sites at no cost, we’re also offering to apply the costs that would go into a straight migration as a discount off of a custom redesign instead.
If you’d like to chat it over or have any questions please book a time here: BOOKINGLINK
Alternatively, if you know a redesign isn’t in the cards and you’d like us to migrate the site as-is please let me know at your earliest convenience so I can get your site scheduled as soon as possible.
Thanks and happy holidays!
Sitewild benefits to discuss with your clients
Selling a migration to a client is a tricky proposition. Instead of focusing on the urgency and negative aspects of migration, we’ve found success in explaining the benefits they’ll gain that LightCMS simply couldn’t deliver.
24/7 Monitoring
Automated monitoring and system engineers work in harmony to ensure platform uptime, optimal performance, and rock-solid security.
Real-time backups
SiteWild takes a snapshot of your sites every 15 minutes, ready to be restored in a moment’s notice if disaster strikes.
Global CDN
No matter where your visitors are in the world, they’ll have fast, convenient access to your sites thanks to the 30+ nodes in our global content-delivery network.
Robust email delivery
A specialized email-delivery platform ensures webform submissions always reach the inbox.
Caching & speed optimization
Every time you save a page, the platform compiles a cached version of all its assets to speed up access for the next visitor to hit the page.
SSL comes standard
Our free SSL certificates for your custom domain eliminate the need to purchase and install costly third-party alternatives. No Cloudflare DNS workarounds required 😀
Flexible page building
No more boring site templates! Craft dynamic, multi-section, multi-column layouts with over 40 content modules to choose from.
100% visual content editing
Never guess what your content will look like after you hit “save.” Every edit happens on the front-end of your site and is shown in a real-time preview.
Granular revision management
Undo any changes you’ve made during your editing session or restore any page to a previous save state with built-in revision management tools.
No vendor lock-in
Any site can be exported to a standalone WordPress installation and remain editable using the same visual content management tools you built it with.
You’ll never have to tell another client “Our website platform is shutting down and we have to rebuild your website.”
Done-for-you LightCMS migration
Many LightCMS resellers have been on the platform for years and accumulated hundreds of sites. It’s a daunting task to migrate in such a short timeframe, especially if you’re a small team. We’re here to lighten the load and ensure a fast, professional, secure migration from LightCMS to Sitewild.
Static Site Backup
$349 one-time fee
Template-Only Migration
$499 one-time fee*
Our team will migrate your LightCMS site templates (global header/footer, homepage, inside page layouts) in Sitewild. You’ll use those templates to build out the site pages and content.
Full-Site Migration
$749 one-time fee*
Full-site migration includes migration of your LightCMS templates as well as setup of all pages**, text, images, blog posts, webforms, and other content from LightCMS into Sitewild.
Full-Site Migration with SEO verification
$1199 one-time fee*
This migration includes transfer of the full site, templates, and content plus title, meta description data and proper mapping/301 redirecting of existing website URLs to their locations in the new platform.
*After launching a site on Sitewild, all normal monthly site fees will still apply.
**Full-site migrations include transfer of up to 20 pages of content. More pages can be migrated at an additional cost. Online store migration available at additional cost.
Need to discuss your migration strategy with a LightCMS expert?
How Sitewild will support you during migration
Assisted site migrations
Whether you need full done-for-you site migrations, template setup only (we build the template, you migrate the content), or just help troubleshooting edge cases as you do the build yourself, our team is available to assist every step of the way.
Static site generation & hosting
If a client isn’t interested in migrating their existing site or you need more time to transfer your client’s site during a redesign/rebuild, we can take a full static backup of the client’s entire site and host it until the new site is ready.
CMS-based site editing and certain dynamic features of LightCMS will not be available as a part of a static backup.
Automated migration tools
We currently have a blog importer available and are working on additional tools to make it easier to migrate pages, SEO data, images, photo galleries, files, and products.