Is Your Legacy Platform Holding Back Your Commerce Growth?

Plan your migration
Whether it’s a custom-built in-house system or an older platform that wasn’t designed for AI, legacy CMS infrastructure wasn’t built for the way commerce moves now. Amplience gets enterprise teams live in as little as 8 weeks.

Why staying on a legacy CMS costs more than migrating

Every delay compounds. Whether you built it yourself or bought it a decade ago, the signs are the same.

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Developers stuck in bottlenecks

Simple content changes eat engineering time. Teams wait on deployments for updates that should take minutes.
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Campaigns delayed by release cycles

Marketing depends on IT to publish. Campaigns miss their windows. And the release backlog just keeps building.
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Scale without the infrastructure

Your commerce ambitions are bigger than your platform. Legacy architecture puts a ceiling on growth.
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Hidden recruitment cost

Recruiting someone with modern CMS skills onto a bespoke legacy platform means retraining from day one. The skills gap widens every year you stay.
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Fragmented omnichannel experiences

Content published to one channel has to be manually recreated for every other. Web, app, and social all end up out of sync.

How does a CMS migration work?

Migration isn’t a cliff edge. It’s a phased, supported programme, and your teams keep operating throughout.

Phase 1: Discovery and modeling

We audit your current content structure, integrations, and SEO footprint. Your content architecture is defined before a single line moves.

Phase 2: Enablement workshops

Dev, UX, and marketing are aligned before anyone touches anything. Roles, workflows, and governance are set before migration begins.

Phase 3: Integration and migration

Most teams use what’s known as the strangler pattern: migrate assets first using Amplience Dynamic Media for immediate speed wins, then move CMS content incrementally. You see results before the full migration is complete and the business never stops.

Phase 4: Training and rollout

Editors are onboarded before go-live, not after. QA is automated. Launch is just the start of a continuous improvement cycle.

What Amplience brings to your migration

Every migration is different. What doesn’t change is the risk of getting it wrong. Amplience brings the methodology, the technology, and the people to make sure you don’t.

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Content modeling framework

Amplience and its SI partner network have established playbooks to map your existing content structures to a composable model. You’re not starting from scratch.
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Pre-built commerce connections

Shopify, commercetools, Salesforce and more. Launch-critical integrations are ready on day one, not six weeks later.
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Asset migration, without the chaos

Move millions of assets without losing metadata, breaking links, or duplicating files. Content Hub migrates your DAM and your content in the same motion, so nothing gets left behind.
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Publishing independence from day one

Your marketing team doesn’t stop while migration’s in progress. Amplience gives editors publishing independence from day one, so the business keeps moving while the platform changes underneath it.
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Arrive on the new platform ahead, not just level

Migration is the moment to stop carrying legacy content forward and start with a cleaner, faster operation. Workforce automates the content tasks that used to need a team, so you arrive on the new platform ahead, not just level.
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Expert-led implementation

Amplience’s Premier Success team guides projects from initial migration through to full launch. Behind them is a network of SI partners with established playbooks.

What are the biggest concerns about CMS migration for enterprise retailers?

“Migration will slow everything down.”

Amplience uses a phased, incremental approach. Teams continue operating on the existing platform while migration runs in parallel. There is no big-bang cutover.

“How do we move content safely?”

Content is validated at every stage. Automated parity scripts check every URL, asset, and metadata field. A content freeze in the source CMS during export ensures data integrity.

“Will our integrations break?”

Integration planning is built into Phase 1. We map every dependency before migration begins and validate each connection before it goes live.

“How long will this really take?”

Amplience projects typically go live in 8 to 12 weeks. The exact timeline depends on content volume, integrations, and your internal approvals. We scope it honestly in discovery.

Ready when you are

Tell us where you are. We'll tell you exactly what it takes to get there.

Book a migration call

14 years of legacy. Gone in 9 months.

John Lewis & Partners migrated a 14-year-old legacy CMS to Amplience in nine months, without stopping trading.

  • Homepage updates: from a two-week SLA to minutes.
  • 9 million assets migrated in three months.
  • A/B testing in stage one showed uplift in key customer metrics.
Read the John Lewis story

For The Very Group and Ulta Beauty, the platform that built their business had become the thing holding it back.

From idea to everywhere

Amplience migrates enterprise teams to a modern, API-first content platform in as little as 8 weeks, without stopping the business. Book a migration call and we will scope it honestly.

Book a migration call

Frequently asked questions about CMS migration

CMS migration is the process of moving a website’s content, data structures, metadata, and integrations from one content management system to another. For enterprise commerce teams, this typically means moving from a monolithic or legacy platform to a headless, API-first CMS. A CMS migration covers more than content transfer. It includes content modeling, URL redirect mapping, integration reconnection, metadata preservation, and team enablement.

CMS migration and CMS replatforming describe the same project for most enterprise teams, with a subtle distinction. Migration refers to moving content and data between platforms. Replatforming implies a broader architectural shift, typically from a monolithic CMS to a headless or composable architecture. For teams moving to Amplience, the two terms are interchangeable.

A headless CMS is a content management system that separates the backend content repository from the frontend presentation layer, delivering content via API to any channel or device. Migrating to a headless CMS removes the architectural constraints of legacy platforms: developers build in any framework, marketers publish without waiting for deployment cycles, and the same content reaches every channel without duplication. Learn more about headless CMS.

Composable commerce is an approach to building digital commerce technology using best-of-breed, interchangeable components connected via APIs, rather than a single monolithic platform. CMS migration to a headless platform is typically the first step in a composable commerce strategy, because it decouples content management from the rest of the technology stack and opens the freedom to choose the best commerce engine, search, and DAM independently. Learn more about composable commerce.

Best-of-breed means choosing the best available platform for each function in your technology stack rather than accepting a single vendor’s all-in-one suite. In a composable architecture, a best-of-breed CMS handles content management, a best-of-breed DAM handles asset management, and a best-of-breed commerce platform handles transactions. Each component connects via API. The result is a stack that is better at each individual job, easier to replace when requirements change, and free from vendor lock-in.

A bespoke in-house system is a custom-built platform developed specifically for one organization. Over time these systems accumulate technical debt, become difficult to maintain, and create dependency on a shrinking pool of developers with the niche skills to support them. A headless CMS is a commercially supported, API-first platform that separates content management from content delivery. It integrates with best-of-breed commerce, DAM, and search tools, receives continuous product investment, and can be learned and operated by any modern digital team. For organizations running bespoke in-house systems, migration to a headless CMS typically delivers faster time to market, lower maintenance overhead, and access to a skills pool that grows rather than shrinks.

Amplience projects typically go live in 8 to 12 weeks, supported by a structured four-phase approach covering discovery, content modeling, phased migration, and rollout. Timeline depends on content volume, integration complexity, and internal approval processes. John Lewis completed a full migration of a 14-year-old legacy CMS within nine months, including 9 million assets, without stopping trading throughout.

A well-planned CMS migration doesn’t need to disrupt day-to-day operations. The Amplience approach is phased and incremental: content moves in stages while teams continue working on the existing platform in parallel. There is no big-bang cutover. Editors are onboarded before go-live, not after, and launch is the start of a monitoring period, not the end of the project.

Digital assets require separate planning in a CMS migration. Legacy platforms often store assets without adequate metadata, which creates reuse and performance problems in the new environment. A DAM migration should include metadata enrichment, deduplication, URL mapping, and CDN redirect validation. Amplience Content Hub handles asset transformation and CDN delivery natively, and the Amplience migration approach moves assets incrementally alongside content rather than in a separate post-launch phase.

A reliable CMS migration partner audits your existing content and integrations before scoping anything, models your content architecture before moving a single entry, and treats SEO continuity as a first-class concern, not an afterthought. Amplience’s approach covers discovery, content modeling, phased migration, and team enablement. Our solutions engineers work alongside your team from day one through to go-live and beyond.