Leaving Sitecore? How to migrate without carrying your old problems forward.

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 Opal — 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.

What is Optimizely Opal? Opal is the agent orchestration platform for marketers, embedded across the full content lifecycle — including within your CMS. It comes with out-of-the-box agents and lets you build your own, no dev work or code required. Learn more here.

Make your content usable again

Legacy CMS environments often store content in large, fixed layouts. While effective for publishing at the time, this approach limits reuse and flexibility.

Modern content systems rely on structured, modular content that can adapt across channels and experiences. This shift is often where migration becomes complex, as teams must reinterpret existing content into a new model.

Opal’s Content Model Creation Agent supports this transition by organizing legacy content into clear, structured components aligned to a modern content model. This allows teams to reuse and adapt content more easily, reducing the need for manual reconstruction.

Work that previously required significant time and coordination becomes part of a more streamlined workflow.

Fix it while you move

Migrations frequently expose gaps in metadata, SEO, and overall content consistency. Addressing these issues late in the process often creates additional work and delays.

By integrating these tasks into the migration workflow, agents like the SEO Metadata Optimization Agent and EEAT Checker Agent enable teams to resolve them as content is prepared. Titles, descriptions, and structural elements are generated and aligned with current standards, while content is refined to match the organization’s current voice and positioning.

This ensures that teams move forward with content that is both current and consistent.

Your content is already being filtered

The way content is discovered has changed. It is no longer only read by people — it is interpreted by LLMs and AI systems that determine what gets surfaced and what doesn’t. According to a March 2026 CNBC report, automated bot traffic has officially eclipsed human users as the dominant form of internet activity — growing eight times faster than human traffic in 2025 alone. Content that lacks clear structure risks becoming invisible without obvious warning signs.

This is already influencing how organizations are found in search and AI-driven environments.

In many cases, evaluating and improving content for these systems requires separate tools and processes. The work happens outside the CMS, creating fragmentation and delay.

Opal brings this capability into the content workflow. Agents such as the GEO Schema Optimization Agent, FAQ Creation Agent, GEO Auditor Agent, and Technical SEO Auditor Agent help teams identify structural gaps, improve clarity, and prepare content to be understood and surfaced effectively in modern discovery environments.

Stop stitching work together

Migration efforts typically fall into one of three scenarios: a straightforward platform swap, a redesign paired with re-platforming, or a phased transition across multiple sites. Regardless of the path, the work spans content, design, and engineering teams. Without a unified structure, coordination becomes difficult, and progress slows.

Within Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform, Opal helps organize this work into clear workflows. Tasks, approvals, and timelines are visible and aligned, reducing friction across teams.

Developers benefit from the same alignment. Access to relevant guidance and support reduces dependency on documentation searches and back-and-forth communication, allowing work to progress more efficiently.

What this looks like when it works

When these elements come together, the result is not simply a faster migration, but a more effective system from the start.

Cherry Bekaert migrated more than 2,800 pages and launched their new site in approximately eight months without losing traffic. They also reduced design effort by hundreds of hours by removing repetitive work from the process.

"When you find a platform that makes your job easier instead of harder, you know you've found the right one." — Christina Keller, Website Manager, Cherry Bekaert

Ryder, after moving from Sitecore, enabled their content teams to operate with greater independence, reducing reliance on developers and accelerating time to market. This made it easier to manage and localize content across regions without additional complexity.

"Localization has always been a challenge... I sat there dumbfounded how easy it was."
— Brian Savage, Senior Product Owner, Ryder

These outcomes are not exceptions. They reflect what happens when organizations address complexity before migration rather than carrying it forward.

Don’t bring the old system with you

A migration should not carry existing challenges into a new system. It should resolve them.

The teams that move most effectively are not those that migrate everything. They are the ones that define what matters before they begin, and build their next system around that clarity.

Ready to leave Sitecore behind — without bringing its baggage with you?

Explore your Sitecore migration path here and talk to our migration team to see what your timeline could look like.

Sources

1. Murti, Lola. "AI and Bots Have Officially Taken Over the Internet, Report Finds." CNBC, March 26, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/ai-bots-humans-internet.html

2. Christina Keller, Website Manager, Cherry Bekaert. Customer story via optimizely.com/insights/cherry-bekaert

3. Brian Savage, Senior Product Owner, Ryder. Customer story via optimizely.com/insights/ryder

4. Studio Science case study. https://www.optimizely.com/insights/studio-science/