AEM migration
Moving off Adobe Experience Manager

AEM
migration

Moving off a platform sized for a problem you may no longer have.

An AEM migration for pharmaceutical companies moving off Adobe Experience Manager: usually because the licence and implementation cost no longer matches the actual requirement, or because the local team cannot maintain it without a specialist agency.

The technology
What is included

What an AEM migration
actually involves

What it involves

AEM is a genuinely capable platform, and also genuinely expensive to licence and operate, requiring specialist skills most local marketing teams do not have in-house. Companies moving off it are usually moving toward something their own team can actually run.

See migrating off AEM for what actually breaks when this move is rushed.

What we deliver

An audit of what the current AEM implementation actually contains, a recommendation for the platform your own team can run day to day, migration carried out with full URL mapping, and a verification pass once live to confirm nothing that used to rank stopped ranking.

Out of scope

We do not take on AEM administration or further AEM development. What we take on is the move off it — including the digital asset library, which migrates as structured, searchable media rather than a folder of files someone has to re-tag by hand.

The asset library moves with its metadata, not without it

AEM’s Digital Asset Manager is usually the part teams most fear losing — tags, usage rights and approval status carried over so the library stays searchable on day one, rather than becoming an unsorted media folder someone has to rebuild by hand.

case studies

Clients we've worked with

Real projects for industrial and pharmaceutical companies.
AEM migration track record
Track record

What our AEM migration
work has moved

The scope our AEM migration work has operated within.

+10
years building for regulated industries
+200
organisations have trusted Code
+1.500
documents migrated with their access permissions intact
+160
scientific papers in a single managed repository
AEM migration by trigger
Who needs it

Why pharmaceutical companies
move off AEM

The trigger differs by company. An AEM migration starts from what actually forced the decision.

Migration process
Four stages

How we run an
AEM migration

Four stages. An AEM migration protects what the platform earned while moving to something sustainable.

AUDIT
01
01

What is actually in the current AEM implementation

We audit the current content, structure and functionality in AEM, since AEM implementations often carry customisation that needs to be accounted for before migration.

What we review

A full content inventory of what currently lives in AEM, since these implementations rarely have a clean single source of truth. We catalogue custom components built specifically for the current site, and decide item by item whether each needs replicating exactly, replacing with something equivalent, or retiring.

Result

A clear, itemised picture of what actually needs to move to the new platform, separated from the legacy AEM customisation that exists only because nobody has revisited it in years.

TARGET PLATFORM
02
02

Matched to your actual requirement

We recommend a target platform based on your real content volume, team capability and functional needs, typically WordPress structured properly for the purpose.

What we evaluate

Content complexity and volume against what the new platform needs to handle day to day, your team's actual technical capability rather than an idealised one, and the functional requirements the current AEM build genuinely serves — as opposed to features nobody uses.

Result

A target platform your team can actually operate without a specialist AEM developer on retainer, sized to what your organisation needs rather than a rebuild of enterprise-grade complexity your team never asked for.

MIGRATION
03
03

Full URL mapping to protect visibility

We migrate content and map every URL to preserve the search visibility the AEM site has built, which is the highest risk in any platform migration.

What we handle

Migration of the content itself, complete URL mapping so every existing AEM path resolves correctly on the new platform, and preservation of structured data — schema markup, metadata — that search engines have already indexed against the current site.

Result

A new platform that does not start from zero on search visibility, because the equity the AEM site built up over time is carried across deliberately rather than left to redirect chains and guesswork.

VERIFICATION
04
04

Confirming nothing was lost

We verify content completeness and monitor indexation closely after launch, rather than assuming the migration went cleanly.

What we check

Content completeness checked page by page against the original inventory, redirect functionality tested rather than assumed to work, and indexation monitored closely in the weeks after launch to catch anything Google is struggling to recrawl.

Result

Confirmed evidence, not reassurance, that the move away from AEM did not cost you organic visibility or leave content silently missing from the new site.

AEM migration questions

What comes up when moving off Adobe Experience Manager.

Can an AEM migration preserve existing search visibility?

Yes, when the migration treats search visibility as a deliverable rather than a side effect. Every URL from the current AEM instance is mapped to its WordPress equivalent, including paths generated by AEM’s page hierarchy and any DAM-hosted assets that carry their own indexed URLs. Redirects go live at cutover, not afterwards, so rankings built up under the old structure carry over instead of resetting to zero.

What platform do you recommend instead of AEM?

For most pharmaceutical marketing sites, a properly structured pharmaceutical WordPress build covers the same requirements at a fraction of AEM’s licence and specialist-implementation cost. That said, we size the recommendation to your actual requirement — a group running complex DAM workflows across many brands may still need enterprise-grade tooling, which we would tell you rather than assume WordPress fits by default.

Can you replicate our custom AEM functionality?

Usually, though we treat replication as a starting point for review rather than an automatic requirement. Custom AEM functionality was often built to work around a limitation the new platform does not have, so part of the migration audit is identifying which components need rebuilding and which can be replaced with a simpler, native WordPress equivalent instead.

How long does an AEM migration take?

Timelines depend mainly on content volume and how much custom AEM functionality needs auditing and rebuilding, rather than a fixed formula. A single-market site with a modest page count moves faster than a multi-brand DAM-heavy instance with bespoke components. We scope the actual timeline against the audit findings from your specific AEM installation, not a generic industry estimate.

Related technology we work with

Other technology we work with

AEM migration connects closely with these related technology pages.

AEM migration

Start your AEM
migration

A platform that no longer matches your team or your budget. Tell us your current setup and we will tell you how we would approach the AEM migration.

contact us
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Tell us
about your project

Tell us about your organization’s context and the planned scope of the project.
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