Migrating Our Site to .NET Core from MVC
As a leading Sitefinity Partner, we strive to be on the cutting edge when it comes to our own use of Sitefinity. We are always interested in being early adopters of new Sitefinity offerings and this was no different with .NET Core. We were excited to be the first Sitefinity Partner to have our own website migrated to .NET Core.
Since we redesigned our site only a few years ago, we decided to transition to .NET Core without rebuilding our site from scratch on the new framework. Having both MVC and .NET Core pages within the same project allowed us to keep our existing site running smoothly without any interruption to site visitors while our team rebuilt each page in .NET Core.
NET Core was chosen for lots of reasons. The ability to mix MVC pages with .NET Core pages as we transitioned to 100% .NET Core was a big factor.
Our interest in migrating our website to .NET Core was driven by the following:
- Our desire to invest in the latest development framework
- Our developers benefit from the overall faster development and efficiency that .NET Core brings
- Our developers can be more efficient with customizable open-source widgets
- We really enjoy the new page editing experience of .NET Core
- We like the faster time to market and other productivity benefits for our customers as we start to build client sites on .NET Core
Benefits of .NET Core to Our Team
.NET Core created more efficiency in several areas, mostly with development, page building, and content creation.
Benefits of .NET Core for Developers
Our development team was excited to take advantage of the many benefits of .NET Core including a newer open-source and cross-platform framework, multi-tiered architecture, and decoupled approach to the presentation layer.
It allows our developers to be more efficient since customizations to Sitefinity occur within a separate .NET Core project—and pushing changes does not require an application restart, which saves an incredible amount of time when working on projects.
Benefits of .NET Core for NetOps/IT
Our NetOps team has also experienced the productivity benefits of .NET Core like streamlined upgrades, tighter system security, increased reliability, simpler structure, instant startup, and the stand-alone frontend application with .NET Core’s decoupled architecture which requires fewer resources to manage, run, and deploy.
Marketing Benefits of .NET Core
The advantages to our marketing team were clear as well. With the new .NET Core page-building experience, we are able to build pages quickly and easily and nearly eliminate any need for development help. There has been an all-around improvement in the page-building and content-editing experience. Adding page layouts and widgets is very easy with the new editor. Instead of having several widgets based on content type or content function, like with OOB widgets for MVC, .NET Core rolls all of those into one, which makes for a cleaner and simpler user experience when building out pages. There are styling options built into widgets, like spacing, which is helpful for content editors who don’t know Bootstrap classes but still want the option to add a CSS class to a widget in advanced settings.
With all of these .NET Core features, especially features like section presets, we’ve cut down our page building by at least half the time it took our team to build new pages in MVC.
Third-Party Integrations
While making the transition to .NET Core, we also wanted to upgrade some site features like site search and form CAPTCHA.
First, we integrated Cludo’s intelligent search which has greatly improved our site search experience without requiring time from our developers.
We also wanted to reduce spam form submissions without sacrificing user experience. We landed on Cloudflare Turnstile which is a CAPTCHA-free way to ensure users are real and legitimate site visitors. Adding this feature has virtually eliminated spam form submissions.
We are excited to start building websites for our customers on .NET Core and have learned a lot with this migration process. Companies that want to rebuild their website should strongly consider building on .NET Core. The advantages of .NET Core will be experienced throughout your organization with technology, architecture, and productivity benefits to IT, marketing, and development teams.
If you have any questions about how to transition your current Sitefinity instance to .NET Core, then reach out to our team so we can have a conversation about what that would look like for your website.