Are Media multisite migration

The situation

Are Media is one of Australia’s largest publishing groups, with brands such as Better Homes & Gardens, Women’s Weekly, Marie Claire and Elle. Its sites ran as separate Umbraco builds: custom development for each brand, features built several times over, growing technical debt and expensive hosting. Are Media chose XWP to move them to a single WordPress multisite with a shared design system.

The programme migrated 16 sites. After the first two, I was the product owner for the other 14, with a team of five developers, a project manager, a QA engineer and a designer.

The approach

• A year-long launch calendar: about one site a month. I sequenced the launches by each site’s features, the client’s priorities and the team’s availability, often with several sites in progress at once.
• Checklists at every switch-over: stakeholder and launch checklists, and a validation step for the migrated data before each site went live.
• Quality at every launch: accessibility, and Core Web Vitals kept in the green.
• Stakeholder feedback: I prioritized feedback from client stakeholders into the backlog and managed expectations about what would ship and when.
• Structured reviews with GPT-4: Gourmet Traveller’s restaurant reviews were free text, so search engines couldn’t read them as reviews. I was the product owner for converting them with the GPT-4 API into structured JSON-LD, for pennies per review. The developers built it.

Scale

Across the whole programme:

• 6.2 million monthly active users
• 210,000 posts, 1.15 million images and 46,000 recipes migrated
• 78 production deployments over 41 sprints

Result

Editors publish posts in half the time they took on Umbraco, using a shared library of templates, and every brand now gets features and fixes from one platform.

XWP presented the project at WordCamp Asia 2025: watch the talk.