Website replatforming explained: Mitigating risks and maximizing your ROI

When websites struggle, customers notice. If the technology framework you’re using to deliver content isn't aligned with your business and creative needs, you risk undermining the digital experiences you’re trying to create. 

That may not be a problem for smaller brands with only a limited digital footprint, but if you’re trying to grow your brand in a crowded, competitive marketplace, website friction can make a big difference to your bottom line. For example, a site that takes longer than three seconds to load will, according to Google, see its bounce rate rise from around 30% to 90%, with any delay also negatively impacting the likelihood of conversions. 

The point is, your website is the engine that drives your content experiences and if it can’t keep pace with customers’ expectations, or your ambitions, an oil change and a tune-up might not be enough — it might be time for a new engine.  

But migrating to a new platform carries risks, and costs. If you don’t pick the right environment for your website, you risk increasing your content friction and, worse, wasting the time and money you’ve spent on your website replatforming efforts. 

In this post, we’re going to explore website replatforming. We’ll discuss the reasons why brands decide to replatform, how to avoid common risks, and how to get the most out of the process itself. Let’s dive in. 

What is website replatforming?

In its broadest sense, website replatforming is when a brand decides to move from one website to another. The term usually refers, more specifically, to the migration from one content management system (CMS) to another, which typically also involves making changes to the technology framework (the tech stack) that powers your website. 

So, what is a content management system? It’s the software that you use to organize and manage all the content that you publish on your website. Your CMS not only stores your content, but frames it for display on your website via templates, and allows you to interact with it via a user-friendly interface. 

Website replatforming can be a complicated process. Depending on the size of your business, and your industry, it could involve moving vast amounts of data between CMSes. That includes all digital content assets, customer data, and peripheral materials. 

It’s not a million miles away from deciding to move house. You need to catalogue and pack up all your belongings, review what you do and do not need to move, and then make a plan for where everything is going to go in the new place. 

Replatforming is a decision that requires careful research and planning, but one that, when executed successfully, will help you optimize your content workflows and the digital experiences you’re able to create for your audiences over the long term. 

Why should you consider website replatforming?

When a brand decides to replatform their website, it’s usually to take advantage of new CMS capabilities. But how do CMSes differ from each other? 

The monolithic CMS

Traditional legacy CMSes, like WordPress or Drupal, are all-in-one platforms that tightly couple their backend administrative layers with their frontend content presentation layers (or heads) — an architecture that’s often referred to as monolithic.

While monolithic CMSes offer out-of-the-box functionality, they make it challenging for editors, marketers, and other nontechnical users to work with content, because the assets they want to publish are usually intermingled with code, and any intervention or adjustment risks disrupting wider site formatting. 

Monolithic CMSes also typically don’t scale well because they lock brands into the functionality provided by their vendors. That can make it difficult to integrate new features or third-party plugins due to the need for specialist knowledge of the technology, programming language, and the platform paradigm. 

The headless CMS

The headless CMS is an evolution of the all-in-one legacy system. Instead of tightly coupling its back and front ends, the headless CMS platform ships without a front end; instead it stores content in a machine-readable, extensible format. That gives you the flexibility to use any technology you choose to construct your front end — which communicates with the headless CMS via application programming interface (API).

A headless CMS makes no assumption about what content is going to look like: brands are free to choose their own front ends, or heads, and present content to their audiences in any way they see fit.

All this means that you’re also free to integrate any functionality or third-party provider with your tech stack, and deliver your content to any platform or channel with ease. You can spin up customer touchpoints on web, mobile, or in-store displays via marketing automation, without worrying about fragmenting user content experiences, or needing to scale up your teams to manage multiple platforms.

The content platform 

The next evolution of the CMS, the content platform, makes content management, and website building, even more flexible. 

In a content platform, everything is decoupled: there is no prepackaged administrative layer or presentation layer. You build out both the front end and back end yourself, adding new components, like modular building blocks, to create an entirely customized tech stack. 

Content platforms lean into an API-first design philosophy, enabling developers to create an ecosystem of interconnected microservices and deliver digital experiences that are precisely tuned to their customer’s needs. 

The sheer flexibility and extensibility of a content platform is a huge draw for brands with big content ambitions. Not only do these platforms help brands grow their content offering, but fold in new features that add depth to the way users experience content on their websites. 

Need to appeal to audiences in a foreign country? Add a translation tool. Need to boost site security? Add a dual-factor authentication tool. Need to sell products globally? Add a currency converter — and so on.

Long story short: the possibilities of content platforms can keep websites fresh and future-proofed — which is why so many brands with legacy websites choose to replatform.

The benefits of website replatforming 

Composable possibilities are what pull brands away from monolithic content management systems, but what are some of the more specific benefits of the replatforming process?

Content efficiency

Because content platforms separate content from the technicalities of its presentation, they’re friendly to nontechnical users, who don’t need (or want) to worry about coding complications when they upload content or adjust existing content. That ease of use has downstream benefits, making publication and editing workflows smoother. It also means marketing teams can be more reactive to trends and opportunities, launch campaigns faster, and scale across customer touchpoints more efficiently — ultimately reducing the operating cost of supporting more than one platform. 

Developer efficiency

One of the added benefits of content platforms making life easier for content teams is that developers also get a lot more freedom and bandwidth because they're not spending all their time supporting editorial content creation or management workflows. Instead, developers focus on adding value by building efficiencies on the website, creating new tools and products for the business to market and sell, and so on.

User experiences

Replatforming provides brands with the opportunity to improve user experiences of content. That might mean integrating new features and functionalities that add depth to content experiences, smoothing out friction points, such as page load times, or adding content features tailored to the needs and preferences of certain demographics.  

Scalability

Replatforming to a content platform makes it easier to scale your website, and content experiences, when your business grows. In a composable environment, you can use and reuse content limitlessly, meaning you can spin up new pages quickly when you need to launch a product or a campaign, and you can add modular components to the stack without worrying about code incompatibility issues. 

Cost efficiency

With modular architecture, you only invest in the components that you need to create the digital experiences that you want for your audience. Similarly, you can swap out redundant or inefficient modules whenever you want. While that may mean a higher initial investment than would be necessary for an all-in-one CMS, you’ll save money over the long term. 

Experimentation

Content platforms give developers and editorial teams the freedom to experiment and test content without disrupting the live website. You could, for example, launch multiple different versions of your homepage or your payment gateway, and then analyze visitor feedback or customer data in order to decide which is going to perform best. 

Personalization

By genericizing your content (and decoupling presentation) in a composable tech stack, you’ll be able to stitch content together in new formats quickly. That means you’ll be able to create audience-specific versions of content without adding extra workload for editors. These personalized experiences can slot into any part of the user journey, making them a simple, cost-effective strategy to improve engagement and outcomes on your website and apps.

Omnichannel potential

The reusability of content in a composable architecture means you can serve an array of digital channels with your content. For example, a product review page, complete with text, images, and other assets, written for your desktop site, will work just as well in a mobile app, a tablet, or store display. Omnichannel marketing is particularly useful if you're running an ecommerce store because it means, for example, that product listings will be consistent across your website and your mobile app, and you can be agile with marketing and promotions. 

Content consistency

It’s easy for content to fall out of step between different platforms, especially if separate teams are responsible for web, mobile, in-store content, and so on. By removing the presentation layer and making content machine-readable, you can help these teams work more closely. And since content only needs to be created once, and can be reused anywhere, you eliminate sync issues and prevent fragmentation across touchpoints. That synchronization supports personalization efforts too, because it allows you to identify users and their journeys — you can, for example, track additions to a shopping basket across web and mobile apps.  

AI integration

The machine-readable content stored in a content platform can be easily loaded into AI tools which can analyze and interpret data about your business, such as its tone of voice, and interpret the details of customer journeys. Having that connected insight in your tech stack means that your AI tools can then start making predictions about customer journeys and the experiences that individual visitors might want, and can even start creating new content automatically to cater to those predicted needs. 

Replatforming risks and mitigation strategies

It’s easy to see how the freedom and flexibility of a content platform would appeal to brands with big content ambitions, but it should also go without saying that replatforming demands care and consideration. 

With that in mind, let’s explore the key risks of replatforming — and how to mitigate them.

Misaligned goals and capabilities

You won’t be able to optimize your new website if you don’t go into your replatforming project with clearly defined business and content goals. Similarly, without a clear understanding of the capabilities of the new website platform, you’ll end up delaying your migration as you work backward to identify gaps and integrate critical features. 

For example, if you want your new website to have enhanced payment security for customers using your online store, you'll need to map the content and tech integrations you’ll need in your new environment first. It may also be worth establishing migration milestones to track your replatforming progress. 

Feature replication

While content platforms offer flexibility and extensibility, it will inevitably be the case that you cannot replicate your previous vendor’s offering down to the smallest detail. Similarly, your content platform may not exactly recreate the layout and design specifics of its predecessor — although this will likely involve only minor issues, such as line spacing.  

You can mitigate the risk of feature disparity and design difference through pre-migration planning. Review the ecosystem of modular microservices that are available to you as you develop your new platform, be ready to adapt to creative obstacles, and plan workarounds for any functionalities that you will lose at launch.

Search engine optimization

Replatforming might mean you have to adjust URLs for certain pages, which could end up hurting their SEO performance. Similarly, you may make copy/paste errors as you move content between your new platform and current platform, and end up losing some critical SEO components. Even if you avoid errors, you may find changes to the search algorithm negatively affect page performance in your website’s new home. 

Again, you can mitigate the SEO risks of the replatforming process by planning your migration carefully. Make sure you have mapped the structure of your new website effectively, and have a robust 301 redirect plan in place to handle transition between URLs. 

Proprietary formatting

Some content in your monolithic CMS may be stored in a proprietary format, and so cannot be used outside of that environment. Content may also have been prerendered as JavaScript, CSS, or HTML, which may complicate migration to a new platform. 

It is possible to remove proprietary formatting, and make it generically machine readable so that you can use the content on your new platform. With that said, you’ll need to allocate the time and logistics of the removal process into your migration plan in order to avoid unexpected delays. 

Data loss

Moving between platforms comes with a risk of data loss. Content may, for example, be erroneously deleted or altered during a copy-paste process. 

Perform a rigorous content audit prior to your website migration to mitigate the risk of data loss. Your audit will help you decide what content needs to be moved from your existing platform, and what can be safely deleted. It will also give you an idea of what formatting changes need to be made (see our earlier point on proprietary formatting). 

Getting the most out of your content platform

Website replatforming shouldn’t be a leap into the unknown. There’s no reason why you can’t handle migration risks with proper planning and preparation, and thereby ensure your new platform delivers a return on the time and money that you’ve invested in it. 

Consider the following optimization strategies: 

Replatforming team

There’s no point building an innovative, powerful content platform if you can’t support it with creative, exciting content ideas. With that in mind, don’t just rely on developers and technical team members to oversee your replatforming. Build out your team with a range of stakeholders, including content creators, editors, and marketers, so you can expand perspectives on what you need from your new platform. 

Market research

We’ve talked about the importance of understanding your new platform, but in a practical sense, that means doing legwork. Get to know the landscape by researching which platforms are going to serve your content and business needs best. 

There are plenty of ways to test the waters. Many content platforms, including Contentful, offer demos, free trials, and free account tiers so that you can explore their capabilities prior to purchasing. Don’t forget to check out your candidate platform’s partner ecosystem to get an idea of how you’re going to be able to build out your tech stack. 

If you need an idea where to start, why not check out the Contentful Marketplace?

Content audit 

Your content audit should be thorough and essentially serve to create an inventory of every digital asset held within your IT framework. That scope means you’ll need to map web pages, URLs, text, logos, images, and any other digital media assets — along with their metadata.

When you’ve mapped what needs to be brought over, you’ll need to think about where it’s going to live in the new platform, and whether it’s formatted correctly. Bear in mind that you probably won’t be bringing everything: delete the content that you no longer need, or, if necessary, merge it with other content. 

Identify broken links and create a 301 redirect plan to demonstrate the reliability of your site to search engines. 

Phased replatforming

It’s important that you don’t let replatforming roadblocks derail your live site offering. Downtime can be deadly and, with that in mind, it’s a better idea to execute your migration process in phases, rather than making the jump in one go — and discovering that some critical error has killed your entire site. 

Phased replatforming means choosing a non-critical microservice and moving that over to the new platform in an initial migration phase. You can test the module in its new environment to ensure everything is working, and if it is, you can begin a second phase in which more parts of the website are moved over. Eventually you can move over the critical parts of your website, safe (or safer) in the knowledge that you’ve ironed out the hazards. 

Testing

You should be testing your content platform on an ongoing basis throughout the replatforming process — not only to ensure that you’ve addressed the problems inherent in your old platform, but to verify that you’re delivering the content experiences your audience expects. 

Develop a testing plan, complete with details on how you’ll check the new platform, and how you’ll gauge its performance. Testing isn’t a one-and-done exercise: if you’re executing your website migration in phases, you’ll need to begin testing during the first phase, throughout subsequent phases, and post-launch of the new website. 

Invest in your future with Contentful 

Contentful is designed to not only help you create a new website, but expand your content horizons. And we’ve helped some of the world’s biggest brands do exactly that.  

Our platform leverages an API-first philosophy to help you build from the ground up: program applications with Next.js, sell products with Shopify, manage payments with Stripe, and translate with Lokalise — whatever digital experiences you want for your audience, you can make them with Contentful. 

Our vast ecosystem of partner applications means that your website never has to stop evolving. You’ll be able to future-proof your website against the shifting winds of the market, and move quickly to take advantage of new tools and technology. 

Don’t let your clunky old CMS limit your ambitions. With Contentful as a launchpad, it’s time to find out exactly where your imagination can take you.  

Take a tour

Chat with our team

We'll show you how our composable content platform can enhance 1:1 customer connections and drive growth for your business.

Subscribe for updates

Build better digital experiences with Contentful updates direct to your inbox.