The Website Replatforming Playbook: A Guide to Doing it Right the First Time

You finally got the green light to redesign. That moment when leadership approves your replatforming project feels like a huge victory. But it's also a high-risk and high-visibility project. Expectations for success are equally as high. 

But many times, despite your best efforts and intentions, eighteen months later, you're over budget and behind schedule. Oops. 

The difference between projects that deliver on time and budget versus those that spiral into costly disasters isn't because of a lack of hard work or technical sophistication. It's almost always because the team didn’t follow a proven methodology that addresses both the technology and the people side of transformation.

At Solara6, we’ve helped top brands like Kate Spade, Coach, M&M’s, and Mattress Firm navigate this exact process with fewer delays and lower costs. This playbook reflects the best practices that we learned in collaboration with our client partners.

What follows are the six key questions that teams should address before they kick off a replatforming project to ensure success.

Question 1: How Do You Prepare Your Organization for Cultural Transformation?

Here's what most teams get wrong: they treat replatforming like a sprint instead of a marathon. When the technical transformation is over, but the operations or commercial teams are not adequately trained and prepared, all that hard work is destined to fail. 

Before you select your first vendor, ask yourself: when your new platform goes live, how do you envision your team using it differently? How will workflows and processes from the legacy systems need to change? The biggest replatforming failures happen when organizations spend months migrating to a new platform, only to use it exactly like the old one. You've essentially paid a premium to change nothing.

Common roadblocks include functional silos, fear of risk-taking, and lack of understanding of the value the replatforming project will bring. Address these upfront, or they'll derail your technical progress later.

Question 2: How Will You Manage the People Side of Change?

This is where good intentions meet reality. Without a proper change management plan, even the most technically sound and well-staffed migration can fail due to resistance, confusion, and misaligned expectations. 

Start by identifying key executive champions who can remove obstacles and advocate for change when times get tough (it will happen at some point). Create clear documentation and briefs that outline business goals and set realistic expectations, for both optimistic and less optimistic outcomes, for before, during, and after the replatforming initiative. 

Establish a way to communicate with key stakeholders to keep them aligned and maintain buy-in. Internal resistance can derail a transformation effort faster than any technical challenge, so plan for it.

Question 3: How Will You Balance Competing Priorities?

Replatforming projects attract feature requests like magnets attract metal shavings. Everyone from the employee level up to the C-suite will suddenly have ideas for improvements, new functionality, and "while we're at it" additions that can quickly derail your timeline and budget.

The key is establishing clear decision-making criteria upfront. 

Create a simple framework that evaluates every request against your core business objectives. Does this feature directly support the goals you defined at the start? Will it measurably improve customer experience or business outcomes? Can you prove it with data, not just opinions?

 When stakeholders come up with new ideas, and they will, you'll have objective criteria for saying yes or no. This isn't about stifling innovation; it's about staying focused on what actually matters for project success.

Question 4: Will This Be Lift-and-Shift or a Complete Redesign?

This decision significantly impacts the timeline, budget, and risk. Choose wrong, and you'll pay for it later. 

A lift-and-shift approach involves moving the application to the new platform with minimal disruption to the user experience. It takes fewer resources, less time, and measuring impact should be cleaner. 

A full redesign offers more transformation potential but introduces complexity, cost, and measurement challenges. Consider your organization's capacity for change and risk tolerance carefully. 

Often, it’s smart to use a phased approach. Start with replatforming, and add more value by improving the user experience in later phases or by use case, rather than trying to do everything at once.

Question 5: What's Your Rollout Strategy?

A "big bang" approach is tempting because it feels decisive. It's also precarious. And we don’t recommend it.

Splitting traffic or doing "canary" rollouts is now popular for good reason. You roll out new functionality incrementally to small subsets, limiting the impact of defects or stability issues while allowing time to work out bugs before they affect your entire user base. 

Consider strategies like brand-by-brand rollouts, segmenting customer channels and flows, breaking monolithic systems into components, or migrating page-by-page.

Your approach should match your organization's maturity and competency levels.

Question 6: How Will You Measure Impact?

Any major digital initiative should have a robust monitoring and measurement strategy. This is critical for three reasons: establishing baselines to measure ROI, holding vendors accountable for performance, and rapidly identifying issues that impact customers and business before they become disasters. 

Baseline your legacy experience before migration begins. Use hypothesis-based testing to anticipate which defects might cause customer journey friction. Implement real-time, automated analytics to deliver rapidly while minimizing defects as you roll out improvements. 

Without proper measurement, you're flying blind. And that never ends well. Our clients have seen up to 200% lifts in conversions and 40% revenue increases, and they only know this by implementing proper measurement strategies during and after replatforming.

Execute with Discipline, Not Hope

The replatforming projects that succeed aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest technology. They're the ones led by a team that does the upfront work to prepare so the execution goes smoothly and is rolled out successfully.