Migrate from Classic CMS to Spire CMS
4 min
Classic CMS has reached end-of-life. Contact Optimizely to start your migration to Spire CMS. Careful coordination streamlines the process.
Benefits of Spire CMS over Classic CMS
Spire CMS offers several benefits for creating and maintaining your ecommerce site:
- Modern architecture – Is built on React/Redux with an optimized CMS data structure to improve load times, maintain a lighter JavaScript payload, and provide a lower learning curve for developers.
- Enhanced page editing – Features an updated column design for flexible page layouts, configurable widgets for low-code/no-code flexibility, and the ability to create layouts for frequently used page types.
- Improved content management – Has advanced publishing options, such as page-specific content for different languages and contexts, page restoration with version comparison, and flexible tagging for easier content organization and retrieval. It also centralizes shared content.
- Optimized SEO – Supports server-side rendering and provides guidelines to ensure search engine crawlers see the same content as users, contributing to improved search engine optimization.
- Better accessibility – Is designed with WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines for easier accessibility certification for storefront pages and components.
- Core Web Vitals improvements – Significantly increases Google's performance scores for pages and components out of the box. See Understand Core Web Vitals for information.
- Site-wide styling control – Uses a configurable Style Guide for centralized site-wide styling changes and the ability to revert to blueprint defaults.
- Simplified data structure – Features a simple CMS data structure for easier management.
- Device preview – Provides quick links for device previews (mobile, tablet, and desktop) to understand page appearance without manual resizing.
- Blueprints – Offers blueprints for enhanced customization and extension.
Set up sandbox
- Add your new Spire Blueprint to your Sandbox repository.
- Request a new Spire website in your Sandbox.
- Build your Spire CMSSpire CMS Take this opportunity to assess your current website design and look for ways to improve it or use the new out of the box Spire CMS functionality to simplify how you build and maintain your website. Consider how you will configure your content and commerce pages with widgets. Commerce page widgets work with existing site information, which simplifies setup. You should also consider SEO, accessibility, and overall site usability.
- You can also work with your partner to use the Classic to Spire conversion tool. This tool allows you to export content from Classic into a Spire format that you can then import into Spire. See the Classic to Spire conversion tool article for more information.
- Export your CMS content from your Sandbox.
Set up production
- Sync your UserFiles from Sandbox (recommended).
- Deploy the Blueprint to merge Sandbox changes to the Production branch.
- Request a new Spire website in your Production Environment.
Migrate to Spire CMS
- Open a ticket with Optimizely Support to schedule your migration.
- Enable maintenance mode on your live website.
- Adjust pricing and inventory service settings to real-time (or other appropriate value).
Note
Generic is not a valid setting for Spire CMS.
- Optimizely converts your live website to Spire and points to the customer/partner provided Blueprint name during your planned migration working session.
- Wait for your Configured Commerce containers to convert. This process takes approximately 10 minutes.
- Import your Spire CMS content.
Note
The import will appear to fail if the process takes more than one minute. Check the import job in the Admin Console for accurate details.
- Verify your website. If any issues are discovered, Optimizely will convert the website back to Classic CMS.
- Turn off maintenance mode.
- After migration, you have the option to request deletion of your Classic Sandbox site.