Replatforming The Pharmaceutical Journal to enterprise WordPress

Why did The Pharmaceutical Journal move off its old platform?

The Pharmaceutical Journal’s existing host was migrating its clients onto a new Software-as-a-Service model. Rather than accept a change someone else had decided on, they used the moment to ask a better question: what do we actually need from a platform, and what’s the best way to get it?

That meant a proper look at the market. Internal workshops, a period of research into what comparable publishers were doing, and an open RFP that went out wide — open source, closed source and SaaS — so the PJ could weigh the major providers and the niche ones against each other rather than defaulting to the obvious names.

The PJ is the publication of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and a trusted source for pharmacy professionals worldwide. The platform it runs on has to match that standing. So the decision wasn’t taken lightly, and it wasn’t taken on price alone.

Why WordPress, and why WP Engine?

We recommended enterprise WordPress on WP Engine, and the PJ agreed. Here’s the reasoning.

WordPress is open source and modular. That matters for a publisher with a long future to plan for: you can adopt a component, adapt it, or drop it as your needs change, without being held to one vendor’s release schedule. The PJ keeps a modern platform and stays free to respond to whatever comes next.

WP Engine is the enterprise managed layer on top — the performance, security and scalability of a hosting platform built specifically for WordPress, drawing on cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Because the hosting isn’t tied to a single provider, the PJ can move to improve performance if it ever needs to. The point of the whole exercise was control, and this is where the PJ got it.

How do you migrate tens of thousands of articles and thousands of subscribers safely?

Carefully, and with the awkward parts planned for first. A 180-year-old publication carries a great deal of content. After reviewing what was on the existing platform, the PJ identified tens of thousands of articles to move, and Box UK supported the third-party handling the migration to make sure everything mapped across accurately.

The subscribers were the harder problem. Thousands of them, across a range of user types, each with its own permissions. We mapped those permissions across exactly — including the rules that cap how many articles certain subscribers can read each month, and the logic that limits particular article types to particular subscription levels. Get that wrong and people either lose access they’ve paid for or gain access they haven’t. We got it right, and the site launched on WP Engine’s deployment process with no downtime.

How was the content made findable for 44,000 readers?

By starting with the content, not the design. Box UK’s UX&D consultants reviewed the existing material to understand how it should be exposed to readers, and how to honour the PJ’s established hierarchy of titles, issues and articles.

From there the team defined an Information Architecture that makes content searchable and findable, plus a set of custom components and templates that help readers break down and absorb large amounts of complex material — scientific and practice-related content that doesn’t simplify easily. The approach was mobile-first throughout, sitting on a responsive framework, so the online journal stays as readable on a phone as the print edition is in the hand.

Subscriptions and advertising

With a significant amount of the PJ’s revenue coming through subscriptions, ensuring these subscriptions could be processed effectively and efficiently was of paramount importance. For this, Box UK’s developers integrated WooCommerce Memberships, an ecommerce plugin providing a site-wide membership and subscription solution built specifically for WordPress installations.

The PJ site also features on-site advertising, to promote relevant services from across the Pharmaceutical Journal’s product range as well as exposing benefits of Royal Pharmaceutical Society membership to drive sign-ups. The Advanced Ads plugin for WordPress was integrated to manage these requirements, and integrated with Google Ad Manager to ensure it worked seamlessly as part of the PJ’s wider advertising infrastructure.

The outcome: a platform built for what comes next

The new site launched smoothly and with no downtime, and the feedback from subscribers and stakeholders has been strongly positive. The PJ can prepare and publish content efficiently, and present it in a clean, modern, easy-to-read way — which is the whole job of a publisher’s platform.

The more important outcome is quieter. The PJ now controls its own development roadmap. When we add something — most recently personalisation through LogicHop — it’s because the PJ decided to, not because a vendor changed the terms. That’s the difference between owning a platform and renting one.