What actually happens during a move away from Adobe Experience Manager, and the specific risks worth planning for before starting.
Pharmaceutical companies migrating off Adobe Experience Manager are almost never chasing a trend — they are responding to a licence and specialist-maintenance cost that no longer matches what the site actually needs to do, or to a local marketing team that cannot make a routine change without going through an external agency. The move itself is straightforward in outline: audit what AEM actually contains, decide what genuinely needs replicating, map every URL with real search visibility, and migrate to a platform sized to the team that will run it day to day. What decides whether that outline holds together in practice is how much of it happens before the migration starts rather than during it — the risk in an AEM migration is almost entirely about work that either happened in the audit phase or did not.
Most commonly, licence and specialist maintenance costs that no longer match the site’s actual requirement, or a local team that cannot make routine changes without an external agency. In practice the specific trigger tends to depend on the kind of organisation involved: an affiliate paying into a group-level AEM licence it can no longer justify locally, a laboratory whose small in-house team cannot maintain the platform without a specialist agency on retainer, a company that adopted AEM for functionality it only ever used a fraction of, or a growing biotech that inherited the platform through a parent relationship and has since outgrown what it actually needs. See AEM migration for the fuller set of triggers we see repeatedly.
Custom AEM components frequently encode business logic that is not obvious from the front end alone, and skipping a proper audit of what exists means discovering that logic mid-migration, at the worst possible time. Full content inventory and functional audit come first, always — before a target platform is chosen and long before a launch date gets set.
A proper pre-migration audit inventories every component type in use, every URL with meaningful search visibility, and every piece of content that lives outside the main content tree — assets, fragments, experience fragments — before anyone commits to a launch date. The timeline built without that audit is usually the one that slips, because the missing pieces surface later, mid-migration, rather than upfront when there is still time to plan around them. In practice that inventory tends to cover:
Do not assume every piece of AEM functionality needs replicating exactly. Custom components were sometimes built to work around a limitation the new platform does not share, and the migration is a natural point to question whether that functionality is still needed at all, not just where to rebuild it. The audit is where that decision gets made — item by item, component by component — rather than defaulted to rebuilding everything as-is because it sounds like the safer option.
URL mapping. AEM implementations often have URL structures shaped by the platform’s own content hierarchy, which rarely maps cleanly onto a new platform’s structure without deliberate, page-by-page mapping — see SEO migration for how that mapping actually gets done to protect existing search visibility.
Mapping every URL sounds like it should be mechanical, but the edge cases are exactly where mappings get skipped and visibility quietly disappears. A thorough mapping pass works through the full inventory and assigns every indexed URL a specific destination, including the ones that are easy to overlook:
Every page with search visibility receives a defined destination before launch, rather than being left to a generic error page or an assumed redirect.
A properly structured WordPress build is the most common destination, chosen because it covers the real requirement at a fraction of the ongoing cost and lets the existing marketing team operate it without permanent developer dependency — see pharmaceutical WordPress for what that structure actually looks like.
The recommendation is not generic. It weighs the content’s real complexity and volume against what the new platform needs to handle day to day, the team’s actual technical capability rather than an idealised one, and which of AEM’s functional requirements the site genuinely uses versus which features are not actively used. The result is a platform sized to what the organisation needs, not a rebuild of enterprise-grade complexity that the organisation does not need to maintain.
The failures we see are rarely visual — they are structural. Individually, each of the following is recoverable if caught early; discovered together six weeks after launch, they compound into a genuinely difficult cleanup, which is why the audit phase before migration matters more than the migration itself:
By treating URL mapping as the highest-risk part of the move, not an afterthought — every indexed URL, including paginated archives, filtered listings and old campaign landing pages still carrying rankings, gets assigned a specific destination before launch rather than left to a generic error page. That mapping work happens during the pre-migration audit, alongside a full inventory of AEM’s components and content, so no page with existing search visibility disappears mid-migration.
It depends mainly on content volume and how much custom AEM functionality needs replicating, since custom components frequently encode business logic that is not visible from the front end. The realistic timeline gets scoped from the pre-migration audit’s findings rather than a generic estimate, because the components discovered outside the main content tree are usually what a rough estimate misses. See how long does a pharma website take for the underlying factors.
Usually a properly structured WordPress build, chosen because it covers the real requirement at a fraction of AEM’s ongoing licence and specialist-maintenance cost and lets the existing marketing team operate it without permanent developer dependency. The recommendation still gets weighed against the specific requirement uncovered in the audit, not applied by default, since a handful of AEM’s features may still need replicating. See pharmaceutical WordPress for what that structure looks like.
Content volume and customisation complexity drive the schedule more than anything else, but so does how much gets caught in the pre-migration audit versus discovered mid-project — URL mappings missed for high-visibility pages, component-level content left behind in AEM’s tree, and multilingual variants migrating inconsistently are each recoverable if caught early, but compound into a difficult cleanup when found together after launch. That is why the audit phase gets scoped before a launch date is set, not after.
Tell us your current setup and we will tell you what a safe migration path looks like.