Three sites. One solution. Migrating from Wordpress to Umbraco.

Our approach.

Blend structured the engagement in two distinct phases, allowing Bedford to make informed decisions before committing to major implementation work.

Phase one: discovery and strategic planning.

Before touching any code, we conducted comprehensive audits and research to understand Bedford's current state and future needs. This included:

• Accessibility and performance audits to help establish a baseline and identify critical improvements
• A virtual workshop with Bedford's team to align on business priorities and understand editor pain points
• Stakeholder interviews across several groups to ensure all voices informed the strategy
• User testing scenarios to validate whether the sites were delivering the intended experience
• Creation of a prioritized backlog that balanced impact against effort, giving Bedford a clear roadmap forward

This discovery phase revealed that consolidating all three properties into a single Umbraco CMS would significantly reduce maintenance burden while improving the editor experience — a recommendation that shaped the entire second phase.

Phase two: migration and implementation.

With a clear roadmap in hand, we executed a budget-conscious migration that prioritized getting a new Bedford site up and running without a major overhaul of the current branding. 

First, we determined the core issue with site speed was due to Wordpress and all of its associated plugins. Our recommendation was to move toward a more custom CMS implementation — in this case, Umbraco. While a full CMS migration is not always the most simple of tasks, shifting to a new CMS also allowed us to take care of several other ongoing issues, including a more purposeful look at custom functionality (at the time handled by those heavy Wordpress plugins) and better standardization of the overall design model.

Design was given a hard look for consistency and reuse, maintaining existing design and brand identities rather than pursuing a full redesign. Rather than rebuild all three sites, we integrated Close It and Tagback into the existing Bedford design system.

Building this on Umbraco made the editorial process easy — while automated migration was used where structured content was present, Bedford themselves used the content entry process to train, test, and get familiar with the new Umbraco site. Features were determined by our priority-based scoping process, which keeps overall budget in mind while determining whether features are launch-critical or good for a later phase.  This approach meant Bedford always knew where they stood and could make informed decisions about prioritization.

The outcome.

Our relationship with Bedford continues as ongoing support partners. Now that their content team works within one familiar system — reducing training time and eliminating the context-switching that plagued their previous workflow.

Project results:

• Consolidated three separate WordPress sites into a single, modern Umbraco CMS, eliminating maintenance overhead and providing Bedford's content team with one unified editorial experience
• Significantly improved site speed and performance by moving away from plugin-heavy WordPress architecture to a streamlined, custom Umbraco implementation
• Standardized design and content structure across all three brands (Bedford Industries, Close It, and Tagback) using the Bedford design system as the foundation, ensuring consistency without requiring a full rebrand
• Established a scalable foundation for growth that reduced training time for content editors, improved accessibility and performance benchmarks, and enabled an ongoing support partnership focused on continuous enhancement

Want to consolidate your web properties without the risk? Our phased approach gives you the research and roadmap you need before committing to implementation.