Migrating WordPress sites to Bubble.io web apps

Rebuild your WordPress site in Bubble. Not a bad idea.

Introduction

We recently started a project for an Australian company to rebuild a WordPress site in Bubble.io. This company has been running a successful subscription business, providing niche content to a specific audience for over 15 years. They have 5 full-time staff and around 10 contractors. Their WordPress site is working fine, but they want to enhance their core product and simplify their business model, so moving to Bubble offers them various ways to achieve this.

Project purpose

The project’s purposes were to:

• Improve the overall User Experience and User Interface design (UX/UI) overall, in particular simplifying the product offering and the “path to buy”.
• Improve on the Activation of customers from Freemium to Premium, and from lower levels of Premium to higher levels of Premium subscription.
• Increase stickiness, and reduce churn.
• Add custom community features to transform the site from being primarily about content consumption to being about content and community interaction. Similar to Reddit, they wanted to add upvoting, comments, and save functionality. But these features are only for Premium users.
• Add customized logging of user activity to be able to better measure Activation and Churn.
• Have tighter control over multiple user roles (Free user, Premium User, Content Creator, App Admins).
• Move management of subscriptions to Stripe for simplicity.
• Reduce the complexity of having multiple plugins.
• Ability to leverage automation.
• Leverage no-code/low-code solutions to be more agile in the future.

WordPress pain points

While the story of WordPress’s origin is inspiring, there are a lot of downsides to using WordPress as the basis for your site:

• It can be difficult to customize the code base and data structures and it requires intermediate to advanced PHP skills to do so.
• Many WordPress sites have a high reliance on plugins, meaning that your product can feel patched together and also have performance issues. Using multiple plugins can introduce potential security vulnerabilities.
• Updates to the WordPress codebase can break your site. But not upgrading can leave you open to security vulnerabilities.
• You have to set up and manage the underlying IT infrastructure, e.g. virtual machines, and databases. It can be difficult to scale.
• You cannot easily build multi-tenanted software solutions.
• It can be difficult to create a unified view of analytics and then build dashboard content on top of this.

Bubble as an alternative

• Bubble.io is a true “no-code” solution, although Bubble refers to itself as “visual programming”. Therefore, not learning to code is a massive advantage of Bubble.
• Having the choice to opt-in to updates to the core Bubble codebase is great, and we are also seeing a commitment from Bubble to fix or roll back code changes that they implement that cause widespread negative effects. (Bubble have a good track record of trying not to break their paying customer’s apps!).
• Bubble takes on most of the security and scalability concerns of the app. All you need to do is learn best security practices (or hire an experienced team) and you will have a whole team of Bubble’s engineers (whose livelihood relies on their solution being secure, scalable, and reliable) looking after the underlying codebase that is actually running your app right now.
• Support from Bubble’s team — you no longer manage your AWS instances or Virtual Machines directly, Bubble handles all of this for you.
• Bubble is easy to learn and many people can pick up intermediate skills in Bubble in programmers can pick it up in 3–6 months.
• A scalable, secure relational database using PostgreSQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that can handle custom data structures. Whatever you are dreaming up in your mind is likely to be possible with Bubble from a data perspective.
• Fully customizable User Roles. You define which tables, rows, and columns each User Role can see within your data with Bubble’s privacy rules. You can even build a multitenant app to service different companies with this approach.
• Fully customizable User Interface using CSS Flexbox, allowing you to build desktop, mobile, and wrapped native app screens.
• Custom API Workflows, Data API, and the API connector allow you to make API calls easily to other apps, allow other apps to perform RESTFul API calls to your database, and even execute custom workflows.
• Integrations to any popular web service with an API, e.g. send emails, SMSs, and collect payments via Stripe.
• A quickly maturing Plugin marketplace.
• System monitoring, logs, and a task scheduler.
• A very fair pricing structure. You could host your site for $29/USD per month and still handle large volumes of traffic.
• A growing and active community.

Risks of using Bubble

• Bubble.io is a relatively young company, having bootstrapped for most of the last decade, but has recently raised their Series A round in 2021. This being said, they are rolling out improvements to their product thick and fast at this time, with substantial improvements seen each month.
• There are certainly more WordPress devs than Bubble devs right now, but this is quickly changing with over 2 million users signed up for the platform.
• Bubble does limit the way lots of things are done which is protective of creating a maintenance headache later, but good technical planning should not be ignored. This is the same as every other custom software development tool.
• Search Engine Optimisation — WordPress is touted as a strong SEO-friendly platform, and some sites built on WordPress would consider SEO to be a high-priority requirement. The bubble has been criticized in the past for lacking in some aspects of technical SEO, however, the new responsive engine has positively improved page load times and Bubble allows for many modern SEO features like dynamic page metadata and dynamic XML sitemaps.

Summary

In conclusion, Bubble offers an affordable alternative to WordPress that addresses many of the pain points faced by WordPress teams and business owners.

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I forecast that many WordPress site owners will migrate their solutions onto Bubble as they seek to improve scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability while giving them greater flexibility to customize their sites without fear of significant breakages due to the upgrading of underlying codebase updates.

Please contact MomentumGroup.tech if you are considering the migration and further development of a successful WordPress site to Bubble, and you’d like to quickly understand the pros and cons specific to your use case.

Looking to build and launch a career in Bubble? Join us at Momentum Academy