1C-Bitrix Websites

1C-Bitrix is a paid content management system, sold outside the Russian-speaking market as Bitrix Site Manager. Companies in Estonia usually meet it in one of two ways: they inherited a website that was built on it years ago, or they keep stock and sales records in 1C and want the online store to take products, prices and stock levels straight from there.

Bitrix earns its licence fee when the catalog has thousands of products with properties and variants, when the 1C exchange has to run on the platform's own built-in tools, and when the sales team already works in Bitrix24 CRM. In that setup every part comes from one vendor and the connections need less custom work.

If you need a ten-page company site or a smaller store with no 1C behind it, WordPress and WooCommerce are the more practical choice in Estonia: the core is free, there are ready plugins for Montonio, Maksekeskus, Omniva and DPD, and developers are easier to find. We say so during the audit even when the enquiry was about Bitrix.

1C-Bitrix comes in several editions: Start, Standard, Small Business and Business. They differ in the set of modules. A company website runs fine on the lower editions, while the online store module with cart, orders and 1C exchange is only in the higher ones. You choose an edition by features, not by the number of pages.

The licence is bought once and includes a period of updates. When that period ends, the site keeps working, but you cannot update the core or install Marketplace solutions until you renew. On inherited sites this period has often expired years ago, which is visible in the admin panel. An outdated core means unpatched security issues and trouble on the day your hosting provider moves to a newer PHP version.

We do not publish licence prices here because they change and depend on the edition. We confirm them when preparing the quote and also check how purchase and renewal are available for your company. The licence is always registered to the client, not to the studio.

When moving to Bitrix from another platform we transfer pages, the product catalog, images and meta data, and build a table that maps old addresses to new ones. Every old URL gets a 301 redirect so Google rankings and external links are not lost.

More and more often the request goes the other way: from Bitrix to WordPress or WooCommerce, usually because the owner does not want to keep renewing the licence or cannot find a developer. Products with their properties and images can be exported from Bitrix, but the 1C exchange has to be rebuilt on the new platform, because the built-in exchange does not come along. We put that into the estimate from the start.

In both cases the work is done on a copy of the site on a test server. Before the switch we agree on a content freeze date for the old site, and after launch we watch Google Search Console for 404 errors and add any missing redirects.

A slow Bitrix site usually has the same few causes: caching is switched off or set up wrong, the catalog filter runs without an index, components make too many database queries, images are not optimised, or the hosting is too weak for the project. We measure first and fix whatever gives the biggest gain. The Bitrix composite cache can serve the static part of a page immediately, but it has to be configured correctly for each component.

Maintenance means regular core and module updates that are tried on a test copy first, checking backups, keeping an eye on the PHP version at the host and reviewing the 1C exchange logs. If another developer built the site, we start with a code audit and look for direct edits to the system core. Those are overwritten by updates and must be moved into separate components beforehand.