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Replatforming Your Website? Avoid These Common Mistakes
Aug 11, 2025 • 10 Minute Read • Richard Cabral, Architecte principal de la plateforme, Sitecore
It's time for a website redesign, or perhaps an entire digital experience overhaul. Here at Verndale, we've helped hundreds of organizations through this transition. There are a number of challenges during a project that tend to pop up across industries regardless of vertical or business size. Before we dig in, let's look at why companies redesign their website.
Why Companies Redesign Their Website
- Change of leadership, marketing staff, company direction, or branding
- New marketing, sales, and/or technical mandates
- Brittle existing website (difficult or expensive to make changes)
- Existing digital ecosystem showing its age
- Dissatisfaction with an agency partner or platform supplier
- Poorly designed digital architecture (tools, infrastructure, etc.)
Which reasons apply to you?
Common Pitfalls in Website Redesign or Replatform Projects
Before diving into platforms and features, these are the key pitfalls organizations fall into across industries:
- Assuming AI or certain platform features will replace developers
- Believing the demo over real-world performance
- Misjudging the scope of integration work
- Not involving your security or privacy teams
- Underestimating content migration complexity
- Failing to align stakeholders across departments
Whether you're focused on brand, content, and conversions, or you're thinking about architecture, security, and integrations, this guide helps both sides prepare.
A Common Thread: Platform Change
Is Your Organization Switching DXP Platforms?
Changing digital experience platforms (DXPs) or content management systems (CMSs) is one of the top client objectives of Verndale redesign projects. This decision affects every system connected to your digital ecosystem, whether you're cutting costs, adding scalability, or functionality.
With the rise of SaaS and AI-assisted tooling, the digital marketing landscape is full of niche players and full-spectrum CMS/DXP solutions. The marketing hype on what a CMS/DXP platform can do for your organization has never been higher.
Let's look at a few sticky topics.
1. The Allure of AI in CMS & DXP Platforms
AI hype is everywhere in marketing these days. Save time and money with AI-assisted brief creation, well-informed content generation, and even webpage/site design.All vendors will tell you that AI is deeply infused throughout their solutions. The reality is often still in beta-level form at best. We recommend taking a very long-term view of large language models (LLMs) capabilities within DXP solutions.
If your project has the time and you're open to being a beta tester for your DXP vendor of choice, be sure to include a proof-of-concept (POC) of any AI-based features. These features should be based on real, actionable business requirements that are already driving your website redesign project.
Keep in mind that for AI to generate content that's useful for your business, it will have to be trained on your business' data. Accumulating and processing training content may be an additional unplanned project milestone.
Questions to Ask Your Vendor:
- Can we trial AI features in a proof-of-concept?
- What training data is required for generative content?
- Who owns the data that trains the AI?
2. SaaS & the March of Progress
For SaaS-based solutions in particular, the vendor arms race to add features never ends. Beware the vendor demo. It will always show their solution in a positive light, and may include unreleased, features-in-progress. If you're working with a partner like Verndale, get a tour of another live solution based on the same platform. Partners can generally give a more grounded opinion on relevant DXP features.
While many vendors can claim 20+ years of pedigree, SaaS platforms are generally bought or built from scratch by newer, leaner teams trying to solve challenges different from "classic CMS" needs. Even well-tread concepts like what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) page editing are being reinvented by all the major players.
Don't be afraid to go deep into the actual capabilities of these systems. A POC based on existing content and a good user experience scenario is strongly recommended.
3. Batteries Not Included (Integration isn't Turnkey)
Adopting a SaaS based solution may also come with some unplanned infrastructure projects. SaaS is a web-based subscription rather than software that runs within the confines of your company's network. Integration requires making any connected back-office system web-capable, with a public API.
Depending on the current state of your CRM, ERP, PIM, DAM, PCM, List Manager, or Search system, a SaaS based DXP may require investment in other SaaS based systems to expose, protect, and scale these traditionally back-office systems. We've seen many SaaS DXP projects extend by months as ancient back-office systems are replaced to ensure a new digital experience is successful.
- Who maintains back-office systems that you'll expose to the cloud?
- Does every component of your martech stack have a modern API layer?
- What security concerns need to be addressed when integrating all these systems?
Platforms that typically get integrated and/or replaced during a website redesign include: list management, forms, CRM, API gateways (Mulesoft, Boomi, Azure, Wokato), WAF (Akamai, Cloudflare, Netlify), CMS, Commerce, PIM, PCM, CMP (Optimizely, Sitecore Content Hub, Workfront, Monday, Jira), DAM, blogging, video delivery, search (Algolia, Coveo, Glean, Solr, ElasticSearch), and AI.
4. What's Really "Out of the Box?" From Platform Vendors
After 25 years of implementing enterprise-grade CMSs, we still get the questions:
"Can I just use the components that come with the platform? Why do you need to develop all these things?"
The answer to this question is usually "it's complicated."
CMS vendors often prioritize feature trends over longevity. As a result, their component libraries are outdated, lack accessibility testing, or require heavy customization to meet your compliance needs.
Let's unpack it:
CMS vendors largely consider page composition a commodity feature. If they do have a component library, it may be a decade old. This limits the implementation partner's options for supporting your design and experience objectives. It "checks the box" in CMS platform evaluations but also has "hidden" side effects on things like accessibility, privacy, responsive design, search engine optimization (SEO), and overall web page performance.
Some CMS vendors (I'm looking at you, WordPress) outsource component design to the developer community. It takes a skilled eye to tell the good components from the bad, and components generally don't come with any warranty or support.
Designing a component library that works for most clients, most of the time, is a very expensive endeavor. The landscape of programming frameworks, design vogue, devices, SEO, and regulations changes constantly. Instead, CMS vendors typically shift the responsibility of component libraries to partners, who often build them, or tools that support rapid component creation, specifically to keep abreast of the latest HTML, SEO, and regulatory needs of clients. Their business depends on their ability to build and adapt to wildly different user experience needs and branding guidelines as low-cost as possible.
Not long ago, it was seen as a benefit if a CMS only generated HTML created by the developer, to stay compatible with the changing web.
5. Do I Still Need Developers?
Despite the presence of "Design to Code" AI tools and "drag & drop component design", the answer is "yes, you probably do." You shouldn't need them for content entry or page composition (if your CMS supports it).
You'll likely still need them for:
- Setting up your DXP/CMS to meet your company's unique business requirements, including content architecture, site structure, automation, etc.
- Setting up integrations between software in your martech stack
- Verifying that the "design-to-code" tool won't break anything
- Monitoring your website performance, which can change based on page content, images, videos, and random third-party tools inserted via GTM
- Communicating with your DXP vendor to get support when you need it
6. Website Security & Compliance
A surprising number of website redesign projects overlook security and compliance, often fail to involve IT and security teams early.
Modern websites connect to several mission-critical systems and collect and distribute customer data. Your security team will have standards to protect corporate assets that may affect which technologies you can use or how they're deployed.
Checklist for Security & Compliance:
- Is user data encrypted end-to-end?
- Does your platform meet GDPR/CCPA, or other applicable laws?
- Are forms reviewed by a compliance team?
- Is customer data stored securely and access-controlled?
"All our contact forms just send an email." If that's still true, you're likely out of compliance.
GDPR and other national and regional laws govern what data you're allowed to collect from your users, with or without their permission, as well as how you store it, who has access to it, and what you can do with it, including how long you can keep it. Chances are, your business has to follow these rules, and you likely have at least one person responsible for enforcing them within your organization.
7. Product Detail Pages (PDPs) for B2B & Commerce
Where is your product information maintained?
- If you're a B2B services company, it might simply be text in your CMS.
- If you're a global manufacturer, product data likely flows from a product management tool to your ERP, a PIM, PCM, or digital commerce platform.
In a redesign or replatform, it's critical to establish the lifecycle of product data, the sources of truth, and the right path to getting that information to your customers across all channels.
It's not uncommon to pair a website redesign project with an ecommerce re-platform, or the introduction of PIM or DAM tools to streamline product data and asset distribution.
8. From Monolith to Modular: What SaaS Changes in Your Stack
If you're moving from an on-premise or cloud-hosted platform to SaaS-based DXP, chances are you're moving from a centralized, hub-and-spoke model to a distributed cloud architecture. That means the data your legacy CMS handled in one place will now live in separate, specialized systems and assembled only in your customer's browser.
Here's what moves where:
- Content storage, page composition, and website delivery will still be managed in your CMS.
- Customer data collection, storage, and marketing emails will move to your (likely SaaS) CRM or list management platform.
- Product data that was once stored in a CMS or ERP may move to a dedicated PIM.
- Personalization will move to its own specialized service (personalization engine).
- Analytics (assuming it hasn't already) will move to a third-party service
- Ecommerce (pricing, ordering, payment) will move to a dedicated commerce platform.
- Search that was once built-in will also move to a discrete platform that may or may not be offered by your CMS vendor.
You'll gain best-of-breed tools for each function, more frequent updates, and innovations from platform vendors. The goal is to get more robust features around each of these sub-systems than you likely had with your legacy platform.
However, this modular model has tradeoffs. All this data is no longer a one-stop location to maintain or extract, and integration between systems becomes essential. Associating content with products will get more complex. 1:1 personalization will mean integrating at least three systems to combine content (CMS), customer data (CRM), and behavioral insights (CDP). In theory, you'll see gains in analysis and customer retention.
9. Content Migration Realities
"You can just migrate all our old content to the new system."
Well...not exactly.
Each CMS was designed at a different time with different priorities. Compatibility between CMS systems has never been an industry priority. Even moving between different versions of the same content management platform isn't guaranteed.
- There's no such thing as "content migration software."—though Verndalea ctually does have a tool that makes migration from any website into our favorite content management systems possible and affordable. Individual vendors or partners may have a tool set, but it isn't turn-key. Moving content between systems requires a lot of development and trial and error.
- Page-oriented CMS platforms like WordPress lack the semantic and taxonomic classification of content that the newer "headless" CMS platforms require. This makes tool-based migration impractical.
- Web content is usually heavily designed around what it needed to look like when the old website was designed. Your new website's look and feel, and its similarity to the old one, have a significant impact on your ability to forward-port your content.
- CMS platforms have a lot in common with that drawer in your kitchen full of matchbooks, AA batteries, and bottle openers: knowing what to keep and what to toss isn't something that can be easily automated.
- Image assets, in particular, tend to be very specific to a website's design. Old images may not "fit" your new design. They may be too small, have the wrong aspect ratio, or be over-optimized, preventing re-cropping.
- Some data that's currently in your CMS might be moving to a third-party system, whether it's into a PIM, a DAM, or something else.
Plan to have a significant period of content review and generation, even if you plan on reusing a lot of your site's existing content.
10. Cross-Team Alignment: Keep Everyone in the Loop
Marketing, or Technology, depending on the motivating factors, typically initiates website redesign projects. It is absolutely critical that both Marketing and Technology assign key stakeholders to ensure project success.
That means a clear Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) matrix, used in project management to clarify roles and responsibilities within a team or organization. It also means a shared timeline, and collaborative decision-making.
Plan Smart to Build Your Digital Experience Right
A website redesign or a full digital experience platform is never just a visual refresh. It can be complex and high-stakes—a project that touches nearly every part of your business.
The pitfalls are real but avoidable. With the right planning, team, and partner, your next redesign can deliver an improved website and a stronger, more connected digital foundation for future growth.
Verndale's seasoned team of experts has helped hundreds of organizations navigate this journey. If you're preparing for a redesign or replatform, we're here to help you avoid the landmines so you can move forward with clarity and confidence.