Case Study: Successful Content Migration in an Enterprise Setting

At a Glance:

• Background: GlobalCorp (a hypothetical large enterprise) needed to migrate 10,000+ pages of content from a legacy CMS to a modern digital experience platform as part of a website overhaul.
• Approach: They conducted a thorough content audit, used automated migration scripts with iterative testing, and implemented robust redirects and quality checks to preserve SEO and UX.
• Outcome: The migration was completed on schedule with negligible downtime. GlobalCorp retained its search rankings, improved site speed and mobile usability, and editors praised the smoother workflow in the new CMS.

Background and Challenges

GlobalCorp is a multinational manufacturing company with operations in 20+ countries. Its corporate website and regional microsites were running on a 15-year-old custom CMS. Content had accumulated massively: product pages, technical documentation PDFs, press releases, blog articles, support FAQs, all in multiple languages. The CMS was unstable and difficult to update, leading to inconsistent content and branding across regions. GlobalCorp decided to migrate everything into a unified modern platform (Adobe Experience Manager, in this case) to enable a consistent, personalized digital experience for their customers and a more efficient authoring environment for their teams.

Key challenges:

• Volume & Variety: Over 10,000 pages of HTML content, plus 5,000 media files and 3,000 PDFs. Content ranged from simple news posts to complex product specs with tables and diagrams.
• Multilingual & Regional Content: Content existed in 8 languages, often with slight regional variations. The migration had to account for language-specific pages and avoid content duplication.
• SEO Importance: The site had high search rankings for many industrial keywords. A misstep could severely impact lead generation.
• Tight Timeline: They aligned the migration with a brand relaunch and needed it done in 9 months.

Approach and Execution

Content Audit & Stakeholder Alignment:
GlobalCorp’s first move was assembling a cross-functional migration task force – IT leads, regional content managers, SEO specialists, and the digital marketing team. Over 6 weeks, they audited the entire content repository. They tagged content by type and quality, identifying about 15% to retire (outdated or redundant info). Each regional manager reviewed the list to ensure nothing crucial was wrongly flagged. They also compiled a master spreadsheet of all URLs and mapped each to a new URL pattern in the future site structure.

New Architecture & Mapping:
The new AEM platform was set up with a consolidated information architecture. Where the old setup had separate sites per country (with duplicated content), the new one used a single site with language copies for each page, improving consistency. The team defined content templates for different needs (Product Page, Article, Resource Library Entry, etc.). For each template, they prepared a field mapping from the old CMS. For example, old product pages had a monolithic HTML blob including tables of specs; in the new system, specs would live in structured tables for better filtering. They wrote transformation rules to extract spec data from HTML into the new structure where possible. Anything not automatable was noted for manual follow-up.

Automated Migration & Testing:
Developers built a migration tool in Python using the old CMS’s database dumps. The script would:

• Extract content and metadata (including publish dates, author info, tags) from the old database.
• Clean the content (strip deprecated tags, standardize character encoding, etc.).
• Upload content into AEM via its JSON API, creating pages in the appropriate language folders and setting properties (title, tags, etc.).
• Upload media files to the AEM DAM (Digital Asset Manager) and update references in pages to point to the new file locations.

They tested this with a subset (English content for one small country site). The first run had issues: some HTML elements didn’t render correctly in the new templates. By reviewing those pages, the team learned they needed to adjust their cleaning step (for instance, wrapping orphan table rows with proper table tags). After a few iterations, they achieved a test migration where sample pages looked almost perfect.

They then scheduled full test runs: migrating an entire language site at once into a staging environment. This helped them gauge performance (it took ~3 hours per language site in staging) and identify any memory or timeout problems to tweak.

Quality Assurance:
After each test migration, content owners in each country were given access to staging to do spot checks. They used checklists (provided by the central team) to examine: Are all pages present? Do special characters (like é, ü) display correctly? Is pagination working on blog lists? Through this, they caught things like missing alt texts and some broken cross-links. The migration script was refined to address these (e.g., ensuring that internal cross-links between pages also got converted to their new URLs).

The SEO team ran crawlers on the staged site and compared it to the live site to verify that metadata and headings were consistent. They also prepared a master redirect list – mapping every old URL to its new counterpart, which the IT team pre-loaded into a redirect configuration on the new site’s web server.

Content Freeze & Launch Prep:
One week before launch, they instituted a content freeze on the old CMS. Any urgent changes were logged and manually carried to the new site if needed. They did a final migration run into the production AEM environment two days before launch, followed by an intense 48-hour QA cycle. This included UAT (User Acceptance Testing) by stakeholders and automated tests for critical paths (like forms and search functionality).

On launch day, with all teams on a conference bridge, they:

• Put up a maintenance page on the old sites (to prevent changes and let users know).
• Backed up final databases.
• Ran an incremental migration for any content changed during the QA week.
• Switched DNS to point to the new AEM-hosted site.
• Activated the 301 redirects.
  The maintenance page was down for only about 30 minutes during DNS cutover propagation.

Outcome and Learnings

Seamless User Transition: The new GlobalCorp site launched with the brand’s new look and feel and an integrated structure. Thanks to the redirects, users following old bookmarks or Google results largely landed on the correct pages instantly. The company’s support lines received almost no calls about “can’t find X on the website,” indicating that behind-the-scenes, the redirection and content preservation efforts paid off.

SEO Maintained (and Improved): In the months following, organic traffic held steady and even grew slightly. The SEO team reported that not only were rankings retained, but some improved due to the faster site speed and mobile optimization the new platform offered. Google Search Console did show a handful of crawl errors at first – mostly obscure pages that had been intentionally dropped. The SEO team created a few additional redirects for those to either similar content or the homepage, to capture any stray visitors.

Performance Boost: The old site had been slow (average page load 5+ seconds). Post-migration, average load time dropped to ~2.5 seconds, as measured by analytics. This was due to modern hosting, better caching, and cleaner code. Bounce rates on content pages dropped by 10%, which the team attributes partly to speed and partly to improved design.

Editor Satisfaction: GlobalCorp’s content editors across regions were trained on AEM and found it significantly more efficient. In feedback sessions, they highlighted features like in-context editing and easier media library as big improvements. This meant content updates (like posting news or updating specs) could happen faster without IT intervention, fulfilling one of the transformation goals.

Lessons Learned: The project wasn’t without hitches. One region’s content (with a non-Latin script) had encoding issues that weren’t caught in testing – some characters turned into question marks. It turned out the database dump for that language was in a different encoding. The team quickly re-ran that region’s migration with the correct settings and fixed the pages within a day. The incident became a lesson: always double-check encoding and language settings for global content. They also learned that involving local teams early (for language QA) was key – those teams found nuances that central QA might have missed.

Overall, GlobalCorp’s content migration was deemed a success. It demonstrated that with rigorous planning, testing, and collaboration, even a very large enterprise can replatform its content with minimal disruption. The company is now leveraging the new platform’s capabilities – such as personalization by region/industry – something that would have been impossible on the old system.

Call to Action: Planning a complex content migration like GlobalCorp? Dotfusion can apply the same best practices that made GlobalCorp’s migration a success. Contact us to discuss your specific scenario and how we can ensure a smooth transition for your content and customer