Before I came to Optimizely, I worked at an analytics company running on Sitecore. I was part of the migration off of Sitecore. We expected the complexity to come from moving platforms. It didn’t. The real challenge came from everything we’d built around it — the accumulated content, the tangled workflows without a DAM or a workflow tool, the decisions no one wanted to revisit.
That pattern repeats across nearly every migration I’ve seen since. Most teams begin a CMS migration expecting it to take over a year. That expectation is grounded in reality. Projects expand. Content accumulates. Decisions slow progress. What starts as a platform change becomes something far broader.
Teams are not deciding whether to change how they manage content. That decision has already been made. The gap is between those who have moved and those still operating as if they have not.
This is not simply a question of speed. It is a question of approach.
Migration isn’t what’s slowing you down
In practice, migration is rarely the limiting factor. The work that slows teams down sits around it. Content that has grown without structure. Pages that no longer serve a purpose. Processes that depend on multiple handoffs to move forward.
A migration provides an opportunity to address these issues directly. Not just to move systems, but to improve how content is created, managed, and delivered.
Most enterprise migrations with Optimizely are completed in six to nine months, even across complex, multi-site environments. Some teams have done it in as little as 90 days — Studio Science launched a fully redesigned site in that timeframe. The actual duration depends on the complexity of your environment, but the common thread is that the platform itself is rarely the bottleneck.
The difference is not the act of transferring content. It is the ability to reduce what needs to be moved and to simplify how it is structured before the process begins.
Start with less, not more
One of the most common challenges in migration is volume. Over time, organizations accumulate far more content than they actively manage — it’s not uncommon for enterprises to find that fewer than half their pages drive meaningful traffic. AI-assisted content creation has only accelerated this, making it easier than ever to produce pages that add volume without adding value. Campaign pages linger. Duplicate experiences pile up. Messaging evolves, but older versions stay in place.
Without a clear way to evaluate this content, it is often carried forward unchanged.
Optimizely Agent platform — the agent orchestration platform for marketers, embedded directly within your CMS — introduces a different starting point. It enables teams to analyze their existing content and identify what should be retained, what should be improved, and what should be retired. Agents like the GEO Recommendations Agent and Content Refresh Analysis Agent help surface these insights automatically. This reduces the scope of migration and ensures that effort is focused on content that continues to create value.