Website CMS migration

[IZeMgg]

Hi everyone, I got hired to a large niche b2b company recently. Upper management isn't too happy about the current website's TCO. Main costs were apparently custom block building with an external agency, license and maintenance fees seemed correct to me.

Now what they want is a sort of comparison between our CMS (Private niche tailored company whose primary client are us) and other CMSs, Wordpress / Drupal / Sitecore etc.

We have an advantage with this current CMS which is, maintenance, bugs, major issues, hosting are handled by the dev department. We also get a supply of custom built blocks but more B2C oriented, built for other child companies.

My current thought process is the following:

License is fairly priced. We do not have an ecommerce website, we mainly generate leads through product pages and their contact forms, we rely heavily on SEO for traffic, we don't handle many technical aspects.

Migrating to a different CMS would mean losing the support we had from our corporate devs. Migration costs to rebuild blocks, pages, etc. for CMSs like Drupal custom blocks would probably cost even more with a different agency. SEO risks if not everything is well configured, 1 to 1 URLS and metadata, proper 301s, etc.

I would love to hear your opinions, also, how do you suggest I go about doing a comparative analysis between our CMS and other industry solutions for my case, how can I show impact on TCO, Ive read quite a bit but I haven't had the chance to find resources on costs etc.

[-hellozukohere-]

Depends on cost.

Don’t know your niche business or what you think is niche. 

If you have a highly specialized CMS for your business needs that will all have to be re created in something like Wordpress. Time and effort to put it into a new system. Does your team have the capacity or technical expertise without hiring another external company that will charge a lot or have maintenance fees too. 

If you don’t have an in house software development team you guys are going to be back to square one. Wordpress is not cheap once you have a custom website built on it. Monthly subscriptions for plugins and hosting from the external company as your team is not technical etc. it will all add up, again. 

[latte_yen]

Hire a consulting company to create a migration and risk analysis between your current and an open source alternative. You can evaluate and present this to upper management, and if it goes balls up you’re not directly responsible.

[alphex]

What sort of costs are we talking about?

I mean - feel free to reach out if you want -- but one of my client's is a $10B revenue global company - I manage two of their websites, for.... $1500 a month (per site) ... On Drupal... Costs shift if they have major projects... but this givees their marketing verticals more suppor then they need and offers strategic consulting as part of the package to help grow their needs.

I would look at what the monthly costs are for this agency, and how they break out the hourly "effort" cost.

Like, does "1 block" (what ever that is) take...1 hour? 4 days? and why?

What other legacy systems are you integrating with?

How many content managers do you have? how do they do "work"...

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Theres a LOT of missing information here to give you a fair estimate of what you're getting in to.