Two companies, one catalogue, and a date the deal has already fixed.
Post-merger website consolidation for industrial groups bringing two digital estates together: overlapping product ranges, two document libraries, two sets of customer expectations and a timetable set by the transaction rather than by the website. Consolidated so neither company loses the visibility or the customer relationships it brought.
Unlike a planned consolidation, the dates come from the transaction: a rebrand announcement, a trading-name change, the point at which one entity stops invoicing. The website work has to fit around commitments already made, which changes the sequencing rather than the technique and makes early scoping unusually valuable.
Both companies have product hierarchies, naming conventions, document taxonomies and specification formats that made sense internally and do not align with each other. Reconciling those is the substantial content work, and it needs people from both sides who understand why each convention exists rather than a decision imposed by whichever platform survives.
Where both companies sold into the same applications, some products compete with each other and customers hold expectations about both. Decisions about which range leads, what is rationalised and how that is communicated are commercial rather than technical, and the website should follow them rather than pre-empt them.
Buyers, distributors and service engineers hold bookmarks, saved documents and part numbers from both estates. A consolidation that breaks those references creates support load at exactly the moment the combined business is trying to demonstrate stability, which makes redirect completeness a commercial concern rather than a technical nicety.
Beyond the sites there are two hosting arrangements, two analytics estates, two consent implementations, two sets of agency relationships and two accessibility positions. Each needs a decision and an owner, and the ones that are overlooked tend to be the recurring contracts that continue billing long after the site they supported was retired.
An assessment of both estates, a consolidation model with the reasoning per decision, a reconciled content and product structure, mapped migration in the order the transaction requires, and decommissioning. See multi-brand consolidation where the timetable is your own.
Code Industrial is the industrial B2B practice of Code Barcelona, an agency building corporate websites and digital platforms since 2015. The same strategy, design and engineering team works on every industrial project, from the first scoping session through to life after launch.
The difficult part differs by what both companies carried. Post-merger website consolidation is scoped from it.
What industrial groups ask when two estates have to become one.
As early as the transaction allows, even if decisions about brand and range are still open. The assessment of both estates, the inventories and the mapping work can proceed while commercial decisions are being taken, and having them ready is what makes it possible to move quickly once the announcement date is fixed.
The one better suited to the combined requirement, which is not always the larger company one. The assessment compares both on content model, product data handling, access control, multi-market capability, cost and the internal capability to run them. Occasionally the answer is neither, and the combined estate justifies a platform that suits the merged business better than either predecessor.
Not where both estates are mapped page by page. Each retained URL and document path goes to its closest equivalent, redirects are tested as a set, and both properties are monitored afterwards. The visibility that gets lost in these programmes is almost always from an estate that was redirected wholesale to a homepage under time pressure.
It is a decision to take deliberately. Where the name carries recognition with customers and distributors, retaining the domain as a redirect, or as an entry point for a period, protects continuity. Retiring it entirely is reasonable once the market has adjusted, but doing so on the announcement date usually costs more than waiting.
Both stay searchable and cross-referenced for a long transition. Customers order by the number they have always used, and distributors hold them in their own systems, so retiring a scheme on a website timetable creates support load rather than clarity. The content model should hold legacy references as searchable attributes on the surviving product record.
The platform work proceeds and the presentation of overlapping ranges stays deliberately adjustable. Product availability and status held as data rather than written into page copy means the site can reflect rationalisation decisions as they are taken, without a content project each time one is announced.
The technical migration is rarely the constraint. Reconciling two product hierarchies, agreeing naming and settling what happens to overlapping ranges depends on people from both organisations and on commercial decisions that may still be in progress. Programmes that slip usually slip on those decisions rather than on delivery.
The duplicated contracts and services. Two hosting arrangements, two analytics estates, two consent tools, two agencies and assorted subscriptions continue billing after the sites they supported are retired. Inventorying them during the assessment, with an owner and a closure date each, is a small task that reliably pays for itself.
Post-merger work usually sits alongside these.
Two platforms, two catalogues and a date the transaction has already set. Tell us where both estates stand and we will tell you how we would approach the post-merger website consolidation.