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The Ins and Outs of Migrating to AEM
Is It Time for a Change?
CMS platforms make it easier to manage digital experiences across websites, applications, and marketing channels. They provide the foundation for common functionality that enable teams to cut back on development time and enjoy more creative freedom. But as digital ecosystems grow more complex, many businesses discover that their existing CMS is no longer flexible or scalable enough to support their growing business demands.
This is especially true for enterprises managing large volumes of content across multiple markets, teams, and customer touchpoints. Fragmented workflows, limited personalization, inconsistent user experiences, and mounting technical overhead are all signs that it is time to reassess your platform strategy.
For many global brands, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) has become that next step. Companies such as Coca-Cola, HP, Philips, and General Motors have adopted AEM to support their large-scale digital operations within a broader Adobe ecosystem.
But AEM is not automatically the right fit for every business. Moving to a new CMS is a serious operational and technical undertaking that requires careful analysis and a clear understanding of your long-term business goals.
This article explores when adopting AEM makes sense, and how to approach the move with minimal risk to your existing digital presence.
Why Businesses Move to AEM
The decision to migrate to AEM is usually born out of necessity and backed up by evidence and strategy. One of AEM’s defining strengths is its personalization and omnichannel approach to content distribution. As they say: “Publish once, publish everywhere.”
Let’s explore some of the benefits that make AEM the CMS of choice for enterprises whose existing platforms are struggling to keep up.
Expanded Functionality
Businesses often move to AEM to extend or improve website functionality. AEM supports custom digital experiences through advanced content workflows, digital asset management, and social and multi-channel collaboration.
Improved Efficiency
Switching to AEM also helps overcome poor website performance and efficiency. It supports stronger CMS and server-side performance while optimizing overall web delivery.
Better UX
Poor user experience is often one of the factors driving AEM migration. The platform delivers more consistent and personalized digital experiences that increase page views and conversions.
Better Management
AEM centralizes the management of mobile applications, mobile websites, eCommerce, and marketing campaigns within a single environment. Its Sites module also helps teams manage multiple websites from a centralized location, improving consistency and reducing administrative overhead.
Better Traffic and Online Visibility
When the transition is handled correctly, sites benefit from improved search engine visibility and increased traffic. Powered by Adobe Sensei, AEM has a unique visual search feature to help locate similar assets in the digital asset manager.
AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) receives regular updates without any downtime, helping businesses deliver content more efficiently while maintaining a seamless user experience.
As part of Adobe Experience Cloud, AEM integrates with a broad range of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions covering analytics, customer data management, campaign orchestration, workflow automation, and personalization. Examples include Adobe Analytics, Customer Journey Analytics, Real-Time CDP, Workfront, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Target.
Better Brand Look and Feel
Some businesses move for the sake of modernizing and strengthening their digital brand experience. They reinvent how visitors interact with their digital content and web experiences through AEM’s personalization, content management, and design capabilities.
Recognizing You've Outgrown Your CMS
Organizations often switch from their existing CMS to AEM when their platform starts lagging in ease of management, back-end flexibility, database management, or compatibility with modern search engine algorithms.
Signs Your Current CMS Is Holding You Back
It's easy to ignore at first. Content updates are taking a little longer than they used to. You're surprised at how much manual effort it takes to launch a new campaign. Developers are spending more and more time on workarounds to support requirements the platform clearly wasn't designed for. Before long, these minor frustrations start slowing down the business. This is often a sign that your current CMS is reaching its limits.
Consider Switching to AEM When:
- Running your business across multiple geographies or global markets
- Having an omnichannel online approach including web and mobile applications
- Wanting to bring your developer and marketing teams together under one CMS
- Needing to execute and track campaigns from a unified dashboard
- Wanting to personalize digital experiences and segment audiences more precisely
- Having rich and numerous digital assets you want to showcase more effectively
- Your current CMS has recurring technical issues affecting rankings, conversions, and ROI.
Once you’ve established that AEM aligns with your operational and business needs, the next step is evaluating how prepared your current environment is for the transition.
It Starts with a Thorough Analysis
It's essential to conduct a thorough analysis before moving content and assets to AEM.
Run a Content Audit
A content audit is as important as the move itself. You should catalog all the site’s content and assets such as copy, images, videos, and posts. Content should be optimized for both web and mobile applications and include CSS, JS, HTML files, binary objects, and anything else of importance. Once you’ve cataloged all the assets, you can decide what goes to the new CMS.
By linking the content to where it resides on your site, you won’t lose any details when you make the transition.
Since AEM is hierarchical, make sure that the legacy system’s content is organized into a hierarchy before moving it to AEM. Here you should consider anything suited for content hierarchy ranging from frequency of content updates, logical bucketing on the basis of page types or creation date to content interdependence between pages (dynamic content).
Ensure a Sound SEO and URL Strategy
In order to move all the assets, you have to follow an SEO strategy and optimize content and URLs so that they’re easily found across the site and in search engines. As far as URLs are concerned, you should indicate redirects and page-not-found errors.
Establish Strong Designer-Developer Collaboration
An AEM implementation requires designers and developers to collaborate closely. AEM website components, structure, features, and overall success highly depend on how well designers communicate the design and how effectively AEM developers translate that design into code.
Leverage the ETL Cycle
The Extraction-Transformation-Load (ETL) cycle helps AEM specialists to migrate content from one system to another. Content gets extracted, rendered into an appropriate format for further analysis, and later loaded to the new CMS.
In an AEM environment, ETL is built up as follows:
Extraction: Content from the legacy systems is extracted as flat file structures such as CSV and XML. The purpose is to convert all content into one file format for further processing.
Transformation: Then, the content gets converted into the destination format. That may also involve rewriting links, mapping tags, removing outdated or unwanted information, and encoding special characters to ensure a smooth migration.
Load: The final step is to load the content to AEM. This can be done with Sling Post Servlet, Content Loader in CRX, Package Manager or another tool of choice.
Your AEM Migration Checklist
Before starting your migration, make sure you have properly assessed and planned for the following areas:
- Define your migration goals
- Read and understand the technical requirements for migrating from your CMS to AEM
- Note all the CMS-specific plugins that you use and the ones affecting the content, in order to find alternatives in AEM
- Review custom styling and content annotation to understand where customization is needed in AEM
- Decide how comments associated with existing posts will be preserved during migration
- Review existing banner content and decide whether it should be migrated to AEM
- Retain the categories and tags associated with the content so they can be recreated in AEM
- Preserve existing content categories and tags so they can be mapped and recreated in AEM
- Retain the table of contents when migrating a series of related posts to preserve their structure and sequence
- Keep all user account data to ensure continuity in AEM
We emphasize these areas because success ultimately depends on how well the process is planned and executed.
Automated vs. Manual Migration
Now that preparation and planning are complete, the next step is choosing how the migration itself will be executed.
When Automated Migration Makes Sense
Automated AEM migration can be a useful tool to save time and effort when moving content and assets from a legacy system to AEM. However, it’s important to consider the complexity of the migration, the size of the content and assets, and the level of customization required in the migration process.
Automated AEM migration is recommended when:
- There is a large amount of content and assets to migrate, making manual migration impractical or time-consuming.
- The migration is relatively simple and straightforward, with minimal customization required.
- The legacy system has a well-documented and standardized structure that can be easily mapped to AEM.
- The content and assets in the legacy system are compatible with AEM’s structure and format.
- The cost of manual migration outweighs the cost of automated migration.
When Manual Migration Is the Better Option
Manual AEM migration is a better option when the migration involves significant customization, compatibility issues between the legacy system and AEM, complex content structures or if quality concerns demand a more hands-on approach.
- The migration involves custom content structures or workflows that require manual mapping to AEM’s structure
- The legacy system contains a significant amount of unstructured or irregular content that requires manual transformation
- The content in the legacy system is incompatible with AEM’s format or requires significant modification to fit within AEM’s structure
- The content requires significant optimization or enrichment before being migrated to AEM
- The migration process requires data cleansing or consolidation, which cannot be done through automation
- The content in the legacy system has a high value or importance and requires a more rigorous quality control process to ensure data integrity
Depending on the approach you go with, there are a few tips that can save you time and budget in your migration process as well as eliminate hiccups along the way.
Best Practices for Automated Migration
- For Adobe Experience Manager migration to go well, you need to establish access to the current production environment to pull up content and move it to the new staging area either manually or automatically.
- The legacy system requires you to conduct an underlying data analysis in order to structure content and assets.
- Build a code that will execute the move of the content to AEM. Your transformation scripts will probably be different depending on the content format and where it resides.
- Map old page URLs to paths in the new system programmatically.
- Code all digital assets such as images, PDFs, videos, and the like to the digital assets management paths in the new systems.
- Manually spot-check whether all content has been migrated correctly.
- Make sure to catalog live copy links and broken links for content that doesn’t match.
- Run your scripts to eliminate bugs and content discrepancies.
- Finally, resolve any issues with design refactoring by modifying and placing content appropriately in the new CMS.
Best practices for Manual Migration
- Sort the content into AEM component properties to make it easy to maintain or extend things if needed.
- Estimate the time for the migration to AEM including the time necessary to run bug scripts, content localization issues, and other reruns.
- Clean up all special styling or HTML configurations to reduce cruft (unwanted code).
- Make sure you employ User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for all your site authoring tools and the new website’s look and feel.
- Take into account the risk of human error and the time needed to expose and fix issues.
A Strategic Shift, Not Just a CMS Upgrade
Businesses rarely change to AEM simply to replace one CMS with another. More often, the decision reflects a larger shift in how they manage digital experiences, content operations, and collaboration across teams.
As the business expands, everything from content delivery and campaign execution to customer experience consistency starts slowing down. The move to AEM creates an opportunity to centralize digital operations, unify content management, and build a more scalable foundation for growth.
Ultimately, moving to AEM is less about replacing a CMS and more about creating a digital foundation that can scale with greater consistency, agility, and control.
Migrate your CMS to AEM
We can map and execute the move with precision and transparency.
