Does this page spark joy? A case against lift-and-shift migrations

There’s a reflex, when a website feels broken, to reach for a new platform without touching what’s on it: “Let’s just migrate everything over to a new CMS.” It sounds like the safe option because nothing gets lost or rewritten; the site just gets a new engine.

In practice, migrations are often where projects blow up. Timelines double trying to preserve every legacy page. Scope creeps as edge cases pile up: the one weird landing page from 2019, the shortcode nobody remembers building, the template that only half-works because nobody wanted to touch it long enough to fix it. Budgets die trying to force old, undocumented content into a new structure built for something else. And at the end of it, the site looks newer but says exactly what it said before, because a migration’s whole job is to preserve the content. Nobody stops to question it.

What we steer clients toward instead: start fresh.

That sounds harsh until you see what it replaces. A migration asks, “How do we move all of this?” Starting fresh asks, “What does this site actually need to say?” Those are different projects with different outcomes. A migration inherits every decision a previous team made, good and bad, and locks them in under a new coat of paint. Starting fresh means no page survives just because it already exists.

Most sites don’t need everything they have. They need fewer pages holding the same information, said more clearly. The one-off event page, the old campaign microsite, the “temporary” page someone spun up two years ago, the duplicate FAQ living in three places: each was reasonable on its own, but together they mean no one trusts any single page as current. Auditing what’s there and folding it down to what’s needed is less flashy, but it usually does more to improve the site.

It’s also, counterintuitively, the more predictable path. A migration’s timeline is hard to pin down up front, because you don’t know what you’re going to find buried in the old site until you’re elbow-deep in it. Starting fresh lets you define scope from day one: here’s what the business needs the site to do, here’s the content that does it. No held-together-with-tape templates dragged into a new system.

This isn’t a clean-slate mandate. A handful of pages will genuinely earn their place in the new site as-is, and that’s fine. What we won’t default to is “preserve everything and hope the new platform fixes it.” The default is asking what the site needs to do now. Does this page still “spark joy,” or at least still do its job? Keep it. If not, thank it and let it go.

If your site’s due for a rebuild and you’re not sure whether it’s worth saving, let’s talk before you commit to a migration. We handle both sides of the work: the content strategy that decides what’s worth keeping, cutting, or rewriting, and the build that puts it to work.