Website Replatforming: A Guide to Moving CMS Platforms
When systems that once supported your growth can eventually start to hold you back, it’s time to consider replatforming your existing web application.
For many organisations, the trigger is not one single issue. It is usually a combination of an ageing CMS, rising maintenance costs, limited integration options, poor editorial workflows, accessibility gaps, slow performance or a platform that can no longer support how the business needs to operate.
This guide explains what replatforming means, how it differs from rehosting, refactoring, and rebuilding, when it’s worth considering, and how to plan a safer migration.
What is website replatforming?
Replatforming is the process of moving, or migrating, an existing system from one platform or infrastructure to another.
A replatforming project typically includes:
Auditing the existing website
Choosing the right CMS, ecommerce platform, hosting, or architecture
Planning content, SEO, redirects, data, and integrations
Migrating content and data safely
Testing performance, security, accessibility, tracking, and integrations
Replatforming, rehosting, refactoring, rebuilding: What’s the difference?
Before deciding how to modernise your platform, it’s important to understand the approaches available. The following terms are often used interchangeably but they represent very different levels of change and investment.
Rehosting: Often called a lift and shift. Rehosting involves moving your website or application to a new environment or infrastructure with minimal changes to the underlying code. It’s a relatively smooth process to move from one provider to another. You can use it as an opportunity to assess your system’s resilience, performance, backup and restore processes.
Replatforming: Replatforming is the move from one platform to another, in a website example this can involve taking your existing website from a bespoke CMS platform for example to an open-source CMS platform. The focus here is on the technical elements such as performance improvements, feature enhancements, improved user experience to meeting business needs such as integrating your website with other systems.
Refactoring: Refactoring goes a step further by redesigning or rewriting parts of your codebase to meet performance, accessibility or architectural goals. This approach can be done iteratively to improve core areas that will deliver greatest benefits.
Rebuilding: A website rebuild is usually more suitable when the current website structure, codebase, design system or user experience no longer supports the organisation’s goals.
Choosing between rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, and rebuilding needs to be weighed against your business goals, the needs of your customers and market demands. While some businesses prioritise short-term stability, others may take the opportunity to rebuild for future innovation to stay competitive.
A clear understanding of your goals and the available options will help define the best approach in achieving short term wins and preparing for future growth.
The three types of replatforming
These are the three ways to replatform your website:
Whole website replatforming
Is typically done when your CMS reaches the end of its lifecycle, becomes difficult to maintain, or no longer allows you to achieve the changes you need. At this point, it’s time to move to a platform that better supports your content strategy and workflows.
Common website replatforming includes moving away from WordPress or proprietary platforms to a secure CMS platform such as Umbraco, or a headless CMS such as Agility CMS, depending on flexibility and control requirements.
Ecommerce replatforming
Ecommerce businesses can outgrow platforms like Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce for many reasons. Some need faster checkout experiences or more robust integrations with ERP and CRM systems.
Ecommerce replatforming allows you to retain your existing product catalogue and customer data while improving site speed, reliability, and the ability to experiment with analytics, personalisation, and new features.
Application or cloud replatforming
Legacy applications are often replatformed to create a more robust environment that controls costs and meets compliance requirements.
Moving to the cloud, particularly through Azure website hosting, introduces managed databases, built-in identity services, and advanced monitoring tools. This reduces the operational burden on internal teams and creates the flexibility to evolve the product over time.
Across all types of CMS replatforming, the goal remains the same: retain core workflows, move to a platform that can scale, and reduce unnecessary burdens.
Contact us today to find out more about website replatforming with I-Finity.
Why businesses replatform
There are many reasons why a business might replatform their websites. Most organisations reach a tipping point where ongoing fixes no longer solve underlying issues. Common triggers include:
Outgrown capabilities: The current platform can no longer support growth, causing capacity and stability issues.
Security and compliance risks: Unsupported software or outdated identity management creates governance challenges.
Integration barriers: Limited connectivity prevents seamless connections with CRMs, ERPs, or data platforms.
Rising maintenance costs: Technical debt and custom fixes drain resources over time.
Operational inefficiency: Teams struggle with inflexible CMS or ecommerce tools that slow delivery.
User experience gaps: Accessibility, performance, and usability need a meaningful upgrade, not another patch.
Replatforming for AI search and structured content
A website replatform is also an opportunity to improve how content is structured and understood by search engines and, more recently, AI-powered search platforms.
This can mean creating clearer page templates, stronger internal linking, consistent headings, accurate schema markup, useful FAQs where appropriate, and content models that help teams keep information up to date.
During a replatform, review whether key service pages, case studies, product pages and advice content are easy to crawl, clearly categorised and supported by structured data. This can help protect existing visibility while making the new website easier to maintain and improve over time.
Reducing the risks of website replatforming
Website migrations can feel risky, especially for content-heavy sites, sites with established search presence, ecommerce sites, or those that need to remain operational throughout the replatforming process.
With upfront planning and a robust change management process the path to replatforming can be managed safely with minimal disruption to a business.
A replatforming project can significantly improve conversion rates, increase performance with faster load times and improve user experience. It can also be an opportunity to achieve operational benefits and connect individual systems to work together seamlessly.
Website replatforming checklist
Use the following checklist as a practical framework for planning your website replatforming project. It will help to ensure that every stage, from discovery to launch, is approached methodically, with minimal risk.
Define project scope and objectives: establish clear goals, success metrics, and any technical or operational constraints.
Select the right CMS and hosting platform: evaluate open-source options (Umbraco CMS), consider hosting models, support and costs of ongoing maintenance.
Plan content and data migration: include all essential elements such as forms, media assets, secure areas of content etc.
Map key integrations: plan for existing or new connections with CRMs, payment providers, and marketing tools.
Review data security standards: address GDPR, PCI obligations, user identity, and access control requirements.
Optimise user experience: define the user journey, reduce your click throughs, focus on making content easily discoverable and searchable.
Create a thorough testing and transition plan: test for performance and accessibility, ensure analytics are in place, and follow a robust testing and approval process.
Track performance: rankings, crawl data, analytics and errors after launch are all valuable metrics to keep track of.
Common pitfalls to avoid with website replatforming
CMS replatforming projects can quickly become costly and disruptive. Avoiding common mistakes will help ensure your replatforming delivers tangible benefits:
Underestimating data complexity: Migrating data needs to be planned for, consider both automated and manual transition of data, content and multimedia assets.
Choosing a short-term platform: A platform that fits now may struggle as traffic, integrations, or business needs grow. Plan for scalability, performance, and API flexibility from the start.
Neglecting SEO foundations: A replatform can affect URLs, metadata, internal links, page templates, structured data, redirects, crawlability and analytics tracking. Neglecting SEO can undo years of search performance.
Overlooking users and stakeholders: Leaving key users and teams out of discovery often leads to frustration and low adoption. Seek end user feedback and involve marketing, operations, and customer service early to align workflows.
Treating replatforming as purely technical: A replatform affects more than code. Training, support processes, and change management must evolve too for a smooth transition.
How I-Finity supports replatforming projects
I-Finity acts as a consultative partner at every stage of your replatforming journey. We begin by clarifying objectives, exploring dependencies, risks, and the current technical landscape, then we define a delivery plan that balances achieving business goals, quality, time and cost.
We provide:
Strategic discovery:
We align business goals with measurable outcomes, establish a realistic scope, and identify dependencies early.
Platform consultation:
Whether you’re looking to move away from WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or a proprietary CMS platform we have validated processes in place to plan and deliver a smooth replatform.
Secure data and content migration:
We review a combination of automated and manual transfer of data, content, multimedia assets. The approach is all dependent on how much existing data and content needs to move over and how many just need to be archived.
Security and cloud hosting:
We provide a fully managed service looking after all your infrastructure needs. Hosting the site, maintaining the hosting environments, and utilising the capabilities within Azure will all be handled to ensure proactive monitoring, security and overall compliance.
Proven experience with complex replatforming:
We provide specialist support to businesses moving away from legacy or limited platforms to more robust, scalable, secure and performant technology stacks that will evolve as their business does.
See how we've helped businesses like yours with replatforming.
Is replatforming right for you?
If your current platform is limiting performance, integration, or team efficiency, replatforming is a strategic step worth considering. It’s a structured, evidence-led change designed to improve capability without unnecessary risk.
Speak to I-Finity today about your replatforming plans.
We can evaluate the options for website, ecommerce, or cloud application replatforming needs, then define a clear, risk-managed route that delivers measurable value on a defined timeline.
