Ten People for Six Months, or One Person for Eight Days
For twenty years we have watched enterprise clients spend six months and a team of ten on a single CMS migration. Most of that time goes to work a machine does better: inventorying pages, reverse-engineering components, re-keying content, and checking the result by eye, one page and one screen size at a time.
Our Automated CMS Migration engine runs that work as a pipeline. It scans every page of the existing site, identifies the UI components, integrations and authoring fields, rebuilds the site in React on an API-first headless CMS, imports the content, and then runs rounds of automated QA and targeted fixes until the new site matches the original. On one recent enterprise migration, that took one developer eight days.
One recent migration, by the numbers
462
Pages Migrated
2
Languages, English and Spanish
32
Content Components
14
Complex Components With Integrations
How the Pipeline Works
Three steps audit the site you have. Five more build, migrate and verify the site you get.
Scan Every Page
A full crawl captures every page, image, stylesheet and script, including content that only appears once JavaScript runs, so the migration starts from what visitors actually see.
Detect UI Components
Repeated markup is grouped into a component inventory: which components exist, every layout variant each one uses, and which pages use them.
Identify Authoring Fields
The text, images, links and options that change from one instance to the next become author-editable fields. Structural markup stays inside the component.
Build in React
Each component is generated as a React component that reproduces the source markup and styling, on a modern Next.js runtime.
Import Into a Headless CMS
Every page is imported into Payload CMS as structured, typed blocks, with its metadata, so authors never re-key content by hand.
Validate Integrations
Interactive features such as search, date pickers, carousels, tabs and dialogs are rebuilt, then clicked through in real Chrome and Safari browser engines.
Test Every Viewport
Each migrated page is compared against the original at the site's breakpoints, from desktop down to mobile, for both markup and rendering.
Fix and Repeat
Automated reviewers log every difference, fixes are planned by root cause and applied in batches, and each round is re-verified. A fix that makes anything worse is rolled back.
What Comes Out the Other Side
A Pixel-Perfect React Site
The rebuilt site renders the same markup, classes and styles as the original. Automated parity checks compare every block against its source.
Fully Authorable Pages
Authors edit blocks with a live preview, choose styles from the approved design system, and drag to reorder blocks and the items inside them.
Every Viewport, Every Interaction
Booking calendars, type-ahead search, tabs, carousels, lightboxes and dialogs work as they did before, from desktop down to mobile.
A Design System in Figma
Once content is structured, the component library can be loaded into Figma as a design system, showing every layout option and the fields behind it.
New: An Adobe Experience Manager Connector
AEM customers have been told for years that leaving costs more than staying. We built an AEM connector for the pipeline to change that.
The connector understands how AEM assembles a page: the responsive grid that divides it into authored components, the Core Component markup inside them, the client libraries that make them interactive, and the DAM rendition paths behind every image. The pipeline takes it the rest of the way. Out the other side comes every page, pixel-perfect and fully authorable in Payload, with automated QA across every viewport.
- Adobe Experience Manager to Payload CMS
- OpenText Web CMS (TeamSite) to Payload CMS
- Any site we can crawl, through the same scan, detect and rebuild steps
Why API-First
We focus on enterprise content management, but this shift is bigger than CMS. Every software platform needs to be API-first, because agents don't click buttons in vendor UIs. They call APIs.
Salesforce made the same bet in April 2026 with Headless 360, rebuilding its platform so that everything on it is available as an API, MCP tool or CLI command. Payload, which joined Figma in 2025, is built the same way: content lives behind an API, and the React front end is just one of the things that consumes it.
The barrier to replatforming has collapsed. The one-off legacy sites your company has carried for twenty years, the ones that never had a business case to migrate, have one now. If your platform still locks content and logic inside a vendor's UI, now is the time to change that.