Social Animal, a website engineering studio operating across the UK and India, today announced the launch of a dedicated migration practice designed to help enterprises move from legacy content platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, and Sitecore to modern frameworks. The company reports completing more than 60 platform migrations over the past four years, achieving an average of 95 percent organic traffic retention after cutover.
The announcement comes as marketing and engineering teams increasingly face challenges with older systems, including rising hosting costs, plugin dependencies, and declining performance metrics. In many cases, migrations result in significant traffic loss during the transition period. Social Animal’s approach aims to reduce that risk by focusing on pre-migration groundwork rather than relying solely on the new platform.
“The destination platform is only part of the equation,” said Melody Sellers, Principal Engineer at Social Animal. “What matters most is how well the existing site structure is understood and mapped before any changes are made. That’s where migrations typically succeed or fail.”
Operating as a Social Animal and an Astro and Next.js agency, the company has built a reputation around performance-focused development and structured SEO implementation. Its work spans platform migrations, headless CMS architecture, programmatic SEO, and multi-region marketing platforms, with more than 200 production projects delivered to date.
At the core of the new migration practice is a three-part methodology. The first step involves building a complete inventory of existing URLs and mapping redirects before development begins. This ensures that search engines and users are directed accurately once the new site is live. The second step preserves canonical tags and international SEO configurations, including hreflang, through rigorous staging checks. The final step prioritizes the content editing experience, treating it as a central deliverable rather than a post-launch adjustment.
This structured approach allows migrations to be executed with minimal disruption, often resulting in only a few minutes of downtime during deployment.
In addition to migration services, Social Animal continues to expand its work in headless CMS development. The team builds scalable content systems using platforms such as Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok, and Payload. These implementations are designed to balance developer flexibility with ease of use for editorial teams, ensuring that content workflows remain efficient after the transition.
Aaron Mitchell, Senior Headless Engineer at the company, noted that many organizations underestimate the importance of editorial usability during platform changes. “A successful migration isn’t just about performance gains. It’s about giving teams a system they can actually work with day to day,” he said.
The company is currently accepting new engagements for the third quarter of 2026, with a focus on projects involving transitions from Sitecore to Next.js and WordPress to Astro. Its migration services, including website migration, are tailored for organizations seeking to modernize their web infrastructure while maintaining search performance and operational continuity.
About Social Animal
Social Animal is an Astro and Next.js agency specializing in performance first websites, headless CMS architecture, and zero downtime platform migrations. Founded in London with senior engineers in Manchester, Mumbai, and Bangalore, the team has shipped over 200 production engagements covering programmatic SEO at scale, multi region marketing sites, and B2B SaaS platforms. The senior team brings a combined 36 years of front end and platform engineering experience. Learn more at https://socialanimal.dev.
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