Moving to a platform your own team can operate without a ticket queue.
A Sitecore migration for industrial manufacturers, distributors and engineering groups leaving the platform. The usual pattern is that licence, hosting and specialist maintenance have grown out of proportion to what the site does, and that the personalisation and multi-channel capability the platform was chosen for was configured once and never revisited.
We audit the item tree, the templates and the rules the current implementation carries, recommend a target platform sized to the real requirement, move the content with a complete URL map, and verify after launch that catalogue pages, document downloads and market variants all resolve where distributors and search engines expect them.
Sitecore is a serious enterprise platform, and the licensing is quoted per organisation rather than published as a list price, so the total varies with edition, environments and delivery model. For a mid-sized industrial manufacturer the licence is rarely the whole story. The recurring cost is the specialist capacity needed around it: a partner or an internal developer who understands the item tree, the templates and the rules engine well enough to make a change safely.
When correcting a technical specification, adding a market variant or replacing a certificate has to travel through that queue, the platform starts to govern the pace of the commercial programme. Our WordPress vs Sitecore comparison for industrial B2B sets out the trade-off in more detail.
An audit of what the current implementation holds against what the licence pays for, including the personalisation rules and workflow logic Sitecore builds tend to accumulate. A target platform matched to your catalogue, your document library and the editorial capacity of the team who will run it. The migration itself with a complete URL map and a redirect set that ships at cutover. Then reconciliation against the inventory, individual redirect testing, and coverage and crawl monitoring in Search Console through the weeks that follow.
The wider approach is described on our industrial website migration page.
Sitecore stores everything as items in a hierarchical tree, and the routing derives paths from that tree combined with template and presentation rules. On an industrial site this produces a URL structure that reflects how the implementation was modelled years ago rather than how the catalogue is organised now: product families nested under legacy campaign folders, market variants stored as sibling items, document items sitting apart from the products they describe.
That structure rarely maps cleanly onto a target platform, and the mismatch is where migrations go wrong. We rebuild the mapping item by item on the long tail rather than trusting a pattern rule, because the pages a pattern rule misses are usually the deep product and document URLs that distributors and specifying engineers link to directly.
Sitecore can serve different content to different visitor segments, and industrial implementations often carry variants aimed at distributors, specifying engineers or procurement leads, or at visitors from particular markets. Some of that is live and valuable. A good deal of it, in our experience, was configured during the original build, has not been reviewed since, and now serves a segment definition the commercial team no longer uses.
Variant content has no single canonical URL to redirect, so it needs a decision rather than a mapping: promote a variant to a real page, fold its substance into the base page, or retire it. We make that list explicit and agree it with your commercial team before the build, so the migration does not quietly delete content someone depends on.
One point deserves weighing on both sides. With Sitecore you hold a commercial relationship with a vendor and, typically, a certified implementation partner. That means a support path, a roadmap you can plan against, and a named party accountable when something breaks: for some industrial groups, particularly those with procurement or internal audit requirements around supplier arrangements, that accountability is part of why the platform was chosen.
Moving to an open-source stack changes the shape of that relationship rather than removing it. Accountability then rests with your agency and your hosting arrangement, which is a reasonable trade when the agency relationship is solid and a poor one when it is not. It is a question to settle before the migration, not after.
There are industrial organisations we would advise to stay. If rule-based personalisation is doing measurable commercial work, for instance serving different pricing, availability or documentation to authenticated distributor segments across regions, that capability has to be rebuilt somewhere and the rebuild has a cost. The same applies where Sitecore is already integrated with the commerce or marketing automation stack your sales organisation runs on, or where a central digital team maintains many market sites from one environment and the governance model depends on it.
Where a procurement policy requires a named vendor with a support agreement, that is a legitimate constraint rather than an obstacle to argue around. A migration is worth doing when the platform costs more than it contributes, and worth declining when it does not.
We do not administer Sitecore, extend it or support authoring on it, and we would not be the right partner for an organisation planning to stay. What we take on is the move away from it, including the part teams underestimate: rebuilding the day-to-day editing experience around how your content team works, rather than reproducing the Experience Editor in a different interface and expecting old habits to transfer.
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 trigger differs by company. A Sitecore migration starts from whatever forced the decision, and the scope follows from that.
What comes up when an industrial company moves off Sitecore.
By treating the URL map as a deliverable. Every path the current site answers to is mapped before cutover, including item-tree routes, template-generated URLs and document downloads. Redirects ship with the launch, canonicals and hreflang are rebuilt for each market, and sitemaps are regenerated. We then monitor coverage and crawl behaviour in Search Console. That is the mechanism that gives the site its best chance of holding position; no agency can guarantee a ranking outcome.
It needs a decision rather than a redirect, since variant content has no canonical URL of its own. During the audit we list every variant, establish which segment it serves and whether that segment is still part of your commercial model, then agree one of three outcomes with you: promote the variant to a standalone page, fold its substance into the base page, or retire it. That list is signed off before the build starts.
Possibly not, and that is worth establishing early. If rule-based targeting is doing measurable commercial work, for example serving different documentation, availability or pricing to authenticated distributor segments by region, that capability has to be rebuilt somewhere and the rebuild carries a cost. We would rather tell you the platform is earning its place than migrate you away from functionality your sales organisation depends on.
Usually a properly structured WordPress build for industrial B2B, with the catalogue fed from the ERP or PIM that owns the product record and the technical document library modelled as its own content type with access rules. We evaluate that against your content model, market count and editorial team size rather than assuming it. Where the audit points elsewhere, we say so before quoting.
The shape of the relationship changes rather than disappearing. With Sitecore you hold a vendor agreement and usually a certified partner, which gives procurement a named counterparty and a roadmap to plan against. After a migration that accountability sits with your agency and hosting arrangement instead. That is a fair trade when the agency relationship is solid, and a poor one when it is not, so it is worth settling before the decision rather than after.
Timelines follow the audit rather than a formula. The variables are content volume across the item tree, how many market and language variants exist, the depth of the technical document library, and how much personalisation and custom logic needs reviewing and rebuilding. A single-market brand site moves considerably faster than a multi-market instance with rule-based targeting and a deep document archive. We scope against findings from your installation.
Sitecore migration connects closely with these related technology pages.
A licence and a change process costing more than the site returns. Tell us what the current implementation holds and we will tell you how we would approach the Sitecore migration, including where we would advise staying.