Enterprise CMS Migration
The last migration came back eight months late, and technically broken.
Enterprise migrations fail as agreement problems, not technical ones. Decide what every page is for before anything’s built, and the launch holds up.
Tell us how many domains you’re merging. Every old URL comes back with a decision and a real destination, the content models get built with rankings in mind, and the launch holds up under testing.
Or text 562-726-2287. No form marathon, no discovery call.
30,000 URLs
Consolidated into one site
Four domains
Merged, not lifted across
Every URL
Gets a decision, not a bulk redirect
The short answer
Enterprise migrations fail differently from small ones. A small one loses rankings because the URL map was an afterthought. A large one loses them because nobody could get four organizations to agree what a page was for. Consolidation is an agreement problem wearing a technical costume.
So every old URL needs a decision, and at this scale that's a project on its own. Redirect it to a specific equivalent, or retire it deliberately. Bulk-redirecting everything to the homepage tells a search engine the pages are gone and passes nothing on.
Model the content for where it's going, don't just port the old structure across, because porting it means paying for a migration and keeping the problem that caused it. And consider what doesn't need to exist at all. On Intermountain, integrating an external medical information API removed thousands of pages of redundant content nobody would have to maintain again. The cheapest page to migrate is the one you no longer own.
Sound familiar
The last migration is why you're dreading this one.
The migration is the part that scares you most, and every vendor you talk to treats data integrity, archiving, and decommissioning the old system as an afterthought.
The last one came back eight months late and technically broken, and you're not walking into that again.
Staff kept rotating and you went through three project managers, so nobody owned the history of why any decision got made.
You felt you missed the window, not because the strategy was wrong, but because the CMS couldn't keep up.
When you tried to leave, the vendor "owned" your CMS and wanted thousands to hand back what you'd already paid to build.
Four teams each treat their own version of a page as the canonical one, and getting them to agree what it's even for feels impossible.
None of this is because your content is bad or your strategy was wrong. It's because the migration got treated as a technical lift when it was an organizational decision. Here's the version where it holds up.
The version where this goes right
The migration holds up under testing, and the launch is the easiest you've had, even at tens of thousands of pages.
No handover that's eight months late and quietly broken. Every URL has a decision and a destination before anyone touches the new CMS, the content models are built with rankings considered from the start, and the four teams have already agreed what each page is for. By launch day the hard part, the deciding, is behind you, so the switch itself is almost boring. Even at 30,000 URLs across four domains.
What it took at Intermountain
What consolidating four domains actually took.
Intermountain Healthcare had acquired several smaller networks and needed one web presence out of four domains and 30,000 URLs. Each network arrived with its own regulatory requirements, team structure, technology, and content approach. The primary agency brought us in as lead content strategy consultant, embedded in their team.
| The problem | What was done |
|---|---|
| Four organizations, no shared view of what mattered | Dozens of stakeholder interviews, recorded and analyzed with Otter and Airtable so the input became countable |
| No agreement on what users needed | User priorities derived from that interview data, then flows designed against them |
| Rankings at risk across four domains | Content models built with SEO considered during modeling, not checked afterward |
| 30,000 URLs to account for | URL mapping across the merging domains with a 301 migration list, so nothing was left behind |
| Thousands of pages of duplicated medical content | An external API from Wolters Kluwer integrated, removing the need to maintain it at all |
| Four different publishing cultures | A hybrid governance model, balancing local updates against central oversight |
| A large blog with no taxonomy fit | AI-assisted categorization into the new taxonomy, saving thousands of hours |
What we do
What we actually do on a consolidation.
- Decide what moves. That's an audit and a set of organizational decisions, not a technical task.
- Model the content for the destination, rather than reproducing the source.
- Build the URL map as a deliverable, with a real destination for every URL.
- Plan governance across the merged organizations, with names against decisions.
- Verify after launch. Redirects resolving, rankings holding, nothing quietly 404ing.
Before you hire us
What this doesn't cover.
The platform build
Separate, and quoted separately. We decide what moves and where it goes. Building the CMS it moves into is its own engagement, with its own team.
Writing the replacement content
Also separate. The consolidation decides what survives, what merges, and what retires. Writing what fills the gaps is its own project, scoped once you know what's staying.
A like-for-like lift and shift
If the content and structure are genuinely fine and only the CMS is changing, a development team can move it and you don't need this. We'll tell you if that's your situation.
What it costs
What a consolidation costs.
Project engagements start at $10,000, and enterprise consolidations sit well above that.
It's scoped per engagement, because the cost tracks domains, stakeholders, and how bad the current structure is, rather than page count. Ongoing strategy runs $5,000 to $15,000 a month. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Related
If it's a different problem.
Enterprise
The whole picture. This consolidation is one part of it.
Enterprise content strategy
For the stakeholder and governance work on its own.
Healthcare content strategy
If the content is regulated.
CMS migration
The mid-market version, for one site moving platforms.
Questions we get
What people usually ask.
No. That's a separate engagement, quoted separately. We decide what moves and where it goes, build the URL map, and plan the governance. Building the platform it all moves into is its own project, with its own team.
No. The consolidation decides what survives, what merges, and what retires. Writing what fills the gaps is a separate project, scoped once you know what's staying.
Every old URL gets a decision, a specific redirect or a deliberate retirement, never a bulk redirect to the homepage. Content models are built with SEO considered during modeling, not checked afterward. After launch, we verify that redirects resolve and rankings hold.
Maybe not. If the content and structure are genuinely fine and only the platform is changing, a development team can lift and shift it. This is for consolidation across organizations, where the hard part is agreement, not the move.
Project engagements start at $10,000, and enterprise consolidations sit well above that, because cost tracks domains and stakeholders rather than page count. Ongoing strategy runs $5,000 to $15,000 a month. Detail is on the pricing page.
Close
You'll know the migration holds before you commit to it.
Every URL with a decision, four teams agreed on what each page is for, and a launch that holds up under testing.
Consolidation is an agreement problem. We settle that part before the CMS ever changes.