Taking site migrations from 8 months to 12 weeks

Context

Bonnier Publications publishes magazine brands across the Nordics, including National Geographic, Bo Bedre, and Gør Det Selv. Each brand site carried hundreds of thousands of articles, and moving one to a new platform took 8 months. At that pace, the platform strategy could never catch up with the business.

My role

I joined as a Web Developer and left as a Senior Web Developer, contributing to steering committees on digital growth along the way. My focus was the publishing architecture and the migration process around it.

What we did

We built the brand platforms on headless WordPress with Vue/Nuxt frontends, backed by a service-oriented Laravel architecture that ended up in use across hundreds of applications. A custom publishing system let editors reuse content across brands and countries. Write once, publish in every country the brand operates in.

The migrations were where it paid off. Moving a site with hundreds of thousands of articles is not a copy job. URLs, structured content, and search rankings all have to survive the move, because a migration that loses organic traffic has failed no matter how clean the code is. We turned a bespoke 8-month effort into a repeatable 12-week process.

Outcome

Migration time dropped from 8 months to 12 weeks per site, proven on real moves: National Geographic, Bo Bedre, Gør Det Selv. The architecture and the publishing system outlived the migrations and kept serving applications across the Nordic portfolio.

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If a platform move feels too big to ever get scheduled, the answer is usually process, not heroics. See how I work or get in touch.