Website migration services

What a large-scale website migration is

A large-scale website migration is the coordinated move of a website from one platform to another: the CMS or DXP migration itself, a rebuilt front end, migrated and restructured content, a full URL and redirect strategy, and SEO preservation across the cutover. Done properly, the controls below are what protect rankings, leads, and editorial workflow through the cutover while the legacy platform underneath is shed.

What a website migration at this scale includes

The word “migration” undersells it. Moving a large website is four projects that have to land together, and treating any of them as an afterthought is where migrations go wrong:

• Platform migration. Replacing the CMS or DXP itself (usually a legacy monolith) with a modern headless platform your editors can actually publish to without filing developer tickets.
• Front-end rebuild. The old front end is welded to the old platform, so a migration is also a rebuild: a custom front end on a modern framework, engineered to performance budgets instead of inherited from a theme.
• Content migration. Extracting years of pages, assets, and metadata; restructuring them into a content model designed for how the business publishes now, not a one-to-one copy of legacy sprawl.
• URL and redirect strategy with SEO preservation. A complete inventory of every URL the old site exposes, a redirect map covering all of it, and parity checks on everything search engines read, so rankings and the leads they generate survive the cutover.

Around those four sit the rest: integrations (CRM, analytics, SSO, search), multi-language and multi-market structure, editor training, and a handover so the new platform is run, not just launched.

The platforms teams migrate off

Most migrations Bejamas runs start from one of a handful of platforms, each with its own failure mode and its own migration playbook. We keep a profile on each, covering what it does well, where estates outgrow it, and what moving off it involves:

• Sitecore. The classic heavyweight DXP: heavy license, heavy infrastructure, and a shrinking pool of specialists to maintain it.
• Adobe Experience Manager. Powerful and expensive; teams leave when the cost and the pace of change stop matching the value.
• Optimizely. Often inherited via Episerver history; migrations here are usually about consolidating a fragmented estate.
• WordPress. Not legacy by age but by accumulation: plugin sprawl, security surface, and a page-builder ceiling the brand has outgrown.
• Drupal. Frequently triggered by a major-version upgrade that costs as much as a replatform, which makes it the moment to actually replatform.
• Umbraco. A solid .NET CMS that estates outgrow when multi-brand or multi-market requirements arrive.
• TYPO3. Common in large European organisations; migrations are usually driven by developer scarcity and editorial friction.

If your platform isn’t listed, the process doesn’t change; the extraction tooling does.

How we run it: Audit → Design → Migrate → Run

Every Bejamas migration follows the same evidence-first path. The audit maps the estate (every URL, template, integration, and content type) and models the total cost of ownership of staying versus moving, so the decision is made on numbers. The platform recommendation that comes out of it is vendor-agnostic: the stack that fits your estate and business case, not one we resell. Design turns that into the content model, the component system, and the migration plan. Migrate executes it in phases, with the redirect map and parity QA built into the pipeline rather than bolted on before launch. And Run is what happens after: we stay on as the web team, so the platform keeps improving instead of starting to decay the day it ships.

One partner, end to end (strategy, engineering, content migration, and the operation afterwards) instead of a systems integrator for the platform, an agency for the front end, and nobody owning the seams.

Testimonial

Bejamas brought the experience we needed at a critical point in our CMS migration. Starting with a design and accessibility audit and then moving into development, Bejamas quickly became trusted partners for us. It felt like working with a team that genuinely cared about the outcome of the project, and not just about checking off tasks. Their support gave us the firepower we needed to push several major projects across the finish line smoothly and with confidence.

How rankings survive a migration

SEO loss is the most common migration disaster, and it’s almost always self-inflicted: URLs changed without redirects, metadata dropped in the rebuild, or a new site that’s slower than the old one. Moving onto a headless CMS adds its own quiet traps, which we unpack in Headless CMS SEO: what actually breaks. The prevention is mechanical, and it’s the methodology we run on every migration, including our own:

• A redirect map generated from a full URL inventory. Before anything moves, we crawl and inventory every URL the old site exposes (pages, assets, parameters, legacy artifacts) and generate the 301 map from that inventory. Nothing redirects “by rule of thumb”; everything redirects because it’s on the list.
• Parity QA on metadata and structured data. Titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, hreflang, and structured data are diffed between old and new, page by page, before cutover. Anything search engines could read on the old site is on the diff list before cutover, and gaps get fixed before go-live, not after.
• Post-cutover monitoring. Crawl errors, redirect hits, and ranking movement are watched in the weeks after launch, so any gap in the map is caught while it’s cheap to fix.
• Performance budgets. The new site ships to explicit Core Web Vitals budgets, enforced in CI. A migration should be the moment your site gets faster, not the moment it slows down. A slower site is one of the few migration mistakes search engines punish on their own.

Testimonial

We struggled with Backlinko's loading speed for years. Due to large, high-res images and illustrations, our page sizes were enormous. And despite optimizing our WordPress theme as much as possible, our load times were still slow. That's when we decided to work with Bejamas to help move us over to Next.js. The move made a tremendous difference in our load times and Core Web Vitals scores.

What a website migration costs

There’s no honest flat rate, because the price is driven by the shape of the estate. The variables that move the number:

• Content volume and structure. Thousands of pages migrate differently than hundreds, and clean structured content migrates far cheaper than years of page-builder freeform.
• Templates and components. How many distinct page types the front-end rebuild has to cover.
• Integrations. CRM, PIM/DAM, search, SSO, analytics; each one is real engineering.
• Locales and brands. Multi-language, multi-market, multi-brand each multiply scope.
• Redirect complexity and compliance. Huge legacy URL spaces, and requirements like accessibility or data residency, add work worth doing properly.

Because those swing widely, Bejamas prices migrations after the audit, not before. The audit produces the URL inventory, the integration map, and the TCO model, so the quote reflects the actual work. The comparison that matters isn’t the migration price against zero; it’s the migration price against another year of license fees, vendor dependency, and a platform your team routes around.

How to choose a migration partner

Migration is where a bad partner costs the most, because failures show up as lost revenue, not just missed deadlines. What separates a safe choice:

• They ask for the URL inventory before they quote. A partner who prices a migration without knowing the size of the URL space is guessing, and the SEO plan is probably a guess too.
• SEO preservation is in the engineering plan, not the sales deck. Ask to see how redirects, metadata parity, and structured data are handled in their pipeline. “We’ll set up redirects” is not a methodology.
• They’ve left your platform before. Extraction from Sitecore is not extraction from TYPO3. Ask for a reference migration off your specific platform.
• They phase the work. A partner who proposes a single launch date for a large estate is transferring their risk to you.
• They stay after launch. The migration is the beginning of the platform’s life, not the end of the engagement. A partner who runs what they build prices and builds differently, because they’ll live with the shortcuts.

The Bejamas take

Migrating large organisations off legacy platforms onto a modern headless stack is our core work, most often consolidating a fragmented, multi-brand estate into one fast, composable system the client owns. We’ve run the playbook above on estates coming off Sitecore, WordPress, Drupal, and the rest of the legacy landscape, and the pattern is consistent: editors publish without developers, operating cost drops (the audit models your specific TCO number before you commit), and rankings come through the cutover because the redirect map came from an inventory, not an estimate. If a migration is on your roadmap, the audit is where it starts: it tells you what the move really involves before you commit the budget.

Migrations in practice

View all work

(Next.js, Contentful, Netlify)Danone

4M+ Monthly Active Users+127% Faster Page Loading

Danone's Alpro: AEM to Contentful, a site marketers run themselves(Next.js, DatoCMS, Vercel)Bennetts

-70% Total Cost of Ownership+44% Mobile Performance+24% Desktop Performance

Migrating Bennetts off Sitecore to DatoCMS: three sites, one platform

Common questions

How long does a website migration take?

It depends on the size of the estate. Page count, templates, integrations, and locales are the big variables. A focused single-site migration can land in a few months; a multi-brand, multi-market estate is a phased program. Bejamas scopes the timeline during a paid audit, then migrates in phases so the first sections ship and prove the approach early rather than everything waiting on one launch date.

Will we lose SEO rankings when we migrate?

Not if the migration treats SEO as an engineering requirement rather than a checklist at the end. The mechanics are known: a full URL inventory before anything moves, a one-to-one redirect map generated from it, parity QA on titles, metadata, and structured data, and performance budgets so the new site is faster than the old one. Temporary fluctuation in the weeks after cutover is normal; permanent loss means something was skipped.

Do we need a content freeze during the migration?

Only a short one, around the final cutover. Long freezes are a symptom of big-bang migrations. A phased approach, with a content sync or a defined delta-migration window for anything edited late, keeps the freeze to days, not months, so marketing doesn’t stop publishing while the platform changes underneath.

Should we migrate phased or big-bang?

Phased, in almost every case at this scale. Migrating section by section (or brand by brand) limits the blast radius of any issue, lets you validate redirects and rankings on real traffic before the rest moves, and delivers value from month one. Big-bang is occasionally right for small estates or hard platform deadlines such as a license expiring, but it concentrates all the risk on one night.

Can we keep our current agency during the migration?

Yes, it’s common. The incumbent keeps running the live site and campaigns while Bejamas runs the migration; we coordinate on the URL inventory, the redirect map, and the cutover plan so nothing falls between the two teams. After launch, you decide who runs what: some clients consolidate with us, others keep the incumbent on marketing while we run the platform.

Does migrating actually lower total cost of ownership?

Usually, and often substantially. Legacy DXP estates carry license fees, specialist developer dependency, hosting for the monolith, and the tax of every change going through a vendor. Consolidating onto a modern headless stack removes the license line, lets editors publish without developers, and cuts infrastructure cost: Bennetts took three sites off Sitecore and cut total cost of ownership by 70%. The audit models your specific number, against your current baseline, before you commit.