Legacy Platform Migration

Your agency quoted you €300K. We'll do it for a fraction of that.

Your platform vendor has moved on. They've built a modern SaaS product and they want you on it. But you're still running the version you implemented years ago. The reason is simple: there is no direct or easy upgrade path.

"40% of enterprise systems are well past their end-of-life, no longer supported by vendors, and dangerously brittle."

— Gartner, Top Predictions for IT Organizations, 2024 ↗

You cannot redeploy a C#/ASP.NET Framework site onto a modern React/Next.js/Vercel SaaS platform. There is no magic button. The site has to be rebuilt. And traditional agencies price these rebuilds at €250K up through and past €1M.

At that price point, migration is a boardroom fight. Most customers don't move. They stay on legacy, pay maintenance1, and quietly consider whether they even want to stay on the platform at all.

The result: you're stuck. The platform is ageing, the maintenance costs are climbing, and every agency you talk to quotes a number that makes migration impossible to justify.

Migrate first. Improve later.

What's needed is a lift and shift — a technology refresh. Take the existing site, same content, same structure, same functionality, and rebuild it on the modern SaaS platform. No redesign. No scope change. Just move the technology forward.

This is the critical discipline, and it's where the industry has consistently failed. The moment a migration project allows scope change — "while we're at it, let's also redesign the homepage, add a new product section, rethink the navigation" — it stops being a migration and becomes a replatforming programme. This is the single most common reason DXP migration projects dramatically exceed their budget — or fail outright.2

A clean lift and shift avoids this entirely. Migrate first. Improve later. Two separate projects, two separate budgets, two separate decisions.

The domain knowledge required hasn't changed. You still need to understand the source platform's architecture, the content model, the integration points, the rendering pipeline, and the target platform's conventions. That takes 20 years of working with these platforms.

What has changed is the cost of execution. The boilerplate, the component translation, the template rebuilding, the CSS rework, the content mapping — the volume work that traditionally took a team of 4-6 people several months — can now be done by one experienced architect working with AI tooling in a fraction of the time.

€250K+→€50–85K

Same migration. AI-leveraged delivery changes the economics.

Who this is for

Sitecore customers on Managed Cloud or on-prem — version 5.x through 10.4. Moving to XM Cloud, Content SDK, or SitecoreAI. This is our deepest area of expertise and where the AI-leveraged cost advantage is most dramatic.

Optimizely/Episerver customers on pre-SaaS installations, moving to Optimizely SaaS or evaluating alternatives.

Other CMS platforms. Craft CMS, TYPO3, WordPress, Drupal — moving onto headless platforms like Contentful, Sanity, Prismic, or Storyblok. The technology pairing differs but the approach is the same: lift and shift, AI-leveraged, fixed price.

Discuss your platform →

Not for customers who want a redesign, rebrand, or new feature development bundled into the migration. That's a replatforming programme — different engagement, different economics, different risks. This service migrates what exists. Design refresh and new features follow as a separate project.

What you get

Phase 1

Discovery & Migration Architecture

  • Legacy installation assessment — full technical audit of the source environment: content model, rendering pipeline, custom code surface area, third-party dependencies, integration touchpoints
  • Component mapping — which legacy components map to which target components; what translates directly, what needs rearchitecting, what gets dropped
  • Migration plan — documented workstream-by-workstream plan with sequencing, dependencies, and acceptance criteria. Fixed-price quote confirmed.
Phase 2

Code Conversion

  • Frontend rebuild — MVC views, C# controllers, and rendering logic converted to React/Next.js on the target SaaS platform
  • Template reconstruction — legacy CMS templates recreated in the target environment; field-level compatibility verified, editorial experience adapted to the target platform's capabilities
  • Environment setup — target platform provisioning, CI/CD pipeline, local development environment
Phase 3

Content & Media Migration

  • Content migration — automated extraction and migration with content type mapping, field-level transformation, language/version handling, and structural validation
  • Media migration — media library assets migrated to the target DAM; asset references updated, broken references resolved
Phase 4

Integration & URL Preservation

  • Integration reconnection — search, personalisation, analytics, CRM, SSO, forms, and marketing automation assessed and reconnected on the target platform. Existing services and APIs rewritten to modern tech stack where needed
  • URL mapping and redirects — full URL inventory, 301 redirect rules configured to preserve SEO equity
Phase 5

Quality & Handover

  • Testing and QA — visual regression, functional parity, cross-browser, performance baseline, accessibility baseline
  • Accessibility assessment — WCAG 2.1 Level A/AA audit with remediation of critical issues
  • Security review — custom code audited for OWASP Top 10; platform configuration hardened
  • Handover documentation — architecture docs, deployment guide, operational runbook, component inventory
  • 30-day warranty — post-launch warranty covering defects against agreed acceptance criteria

Scope discipline

This is a lift and shift. The scope discipline is non-negotiable — it's what makes the price and timeline credible, and it's what prevents the project from becoming the 18-month disaster that gives DXP migrations their reputation.

Included

  • Like-for-like functional migration
  • Code conversion (e.g. MVC/C# → React/Next.js)
  • Template reconstruction
  • Content and media migration
  • URL mapping and 301 redirects
  • Integration assessment and reconnection
  • Environment setup and CI/CD pipeline
  • Testing, security review, and handover
  • 30-day post-launch warranty

Not included

  • Visual redesign or rebrand
  • New feature development
  • Content creation or editorial work
  • Ongoing hosting or platform subscriptions
  • SEO strategy beyond redirect mapping
  • Third-party vendor negotiations

Scope change requests during the migration are handled via a formal change request process, priced separately and scheduled after the lift and shift is complete. This isn't rigidity — it's the single most important decision that determines whether the migration succeeds or fails.

Pricing & timeline

Phase 1: Discovery — €10,000

A two-week deep dive into your legacy installation. We audit the full technical surface — content model, rendering pipeline, custom code, integrations, third-party dependencies — and produce a complete migration architecture.

What you walk away with:

  • Full legacy installation assessment and technical audit
  • Component-by-component mapping from source to target platform
  • Documented migration plan with sequencing, dependencies, and acceptance criteria
  • Fixed-price quote for the full migration, based on assessed complexity
  • Risk assessment and recommendation on scope boundaries

Discovery is a standalone engagement. If the findings change your plans, or if the numbers don't work for you, you walk away with a complete technical picture of your installation and owe nothing further.

Phase 2: Migration — €40K–€75K

The full lift and shift, priced based on the discovery findings. The complexity of your installation — number of templates, components, integrations, content volume, custom code surface area — determines where in that range you land.

Total investment €50K–€85K discovery + migration, vs €250K–€1M+ traditional
Timeline 10–18 weeks 2 weeks discovery + 8–16 weeks migration

Fixed pricing is deliberate. AI-assisted delivery means the work gets done faster. A time-and-materials model would penalise that efficiency. Fixed price aligns incentives: you get a predictable cost, and the speed advantage stays with the consultant.

Milestone-based delivery with deployable increments at each stage — no big-bang handover.

What you provide

  • Access to the legacy installation — codebase, CMS, hosting environment
  • A nominated technical contact who can answer questions about the existing site's behaviour, integrations, and business logic
  • Access to the target platform — SaaS tenant/subscription, deployment environment
  • Access to your issue tracker — JIRA, Azure DevOps, or equivalent. We work within your existing project management workflow.
  • Scope decisions — what migrates, what gets dropped, what gets redesigned separately
  • Timely feedback on acceptance milestones

Why this works

20 years of DXP implementation

We've been around since the very beginning. We've seen it all. Every version from 2005 onwards. Failed migration projects. Successful migration projects. Everything in between. How to go about this isn't based on guesswork, theory, or fancy silver-bullet tooling. It's years of real experience, accelerated by modern AI tooling.

AI-First engineering makes this possible

Claude Code, automated testing and comparison, Playwright, quality assessment tooling, code quality tooling — all of these enable us to make this happen. You'll even inherit the toolchain when we're done, leaving your overall codebase in a presumably much better state.

Technical debt, documented and addressed

A good chunk of it will be cleared during the migration. Some will not. But you will have it all documented — a ready-made backlog of things to start working on when it fits your time and budget.

Fixed-price confidence

Knowing what a migration involves, at the component level, is what makes a fixed price possible. AI handles the execution volume. Domain expertise handles the judgment calls.

What is your current vendor quoting you?
Let us try and match it. You'll be surprised, we promise.

Book a discovery call →