Technical debt refers to the cost incurred by quick fixes and workarounds during development, which add complexity and maintenance challenges over time. In CMS migration, tech debt can result from poor planning, carrying over outdated assets, or failing to leverage new platform capabilities. (Source)
Common sources include lack of communication between teams, carrying over old debt (outdated assets, duplicate data), not taking advantage of new technology, and poor change management. These issues can lead to increased costs, productivity loss, and inconsistent workflows. (Source)
Teams can measure tech debt using code quality tools (e.g., SonarQube, Teamscale), productivity calculations, annual loss expectancy (ALE), and proxy measures like bug counts, mean time to resolution, and site performance metrics. (Source)
Effective strategies include setting up an internal migrations team, conducting a content audit, consolidating and simplifying workflows, designing a composable content strategy, and federating content sources. These approaches streamline migration and reduce future maintenance costs. (Source)
A composable content strategy uses reusable content models that can be mixed and matched across channels, reducing duplication and enabling faster adaptation to new requirements. This modular approach minimizes maintenance and supports omnichannel delivery. (Source)
Content federation allows data from multiple sources to be managed through a single GraphQL API, reducing the need for maintenance-heavy integrations and batch processing. This approach streamlines data management and supports efficient scaling. (Source)
Poor change management can lead to low employee adoption, loss of critical knowledge, and a return to outdated workflows. Proper documentation and training are essential to ensure a smooth transition and minimize future tech debt. (Source)
Technical debt can lead to increased operational costs, lost productivity, and revenue loss due to downtime or inefficiencies. For example, annual loss expectancy (ALE) calculations can quantify the financial risk associated with tech debt. (Source)
A content audit identifies redundant, obsolete, and trivial assets that do not need to be migrated, streamlining the process and reducing future maintenance. Mapping data relationships ensures a smoother transition to a headless CMS. (Source)
Hygraph provides a Content API & Management SDK, auto-generated GraphQL mutations, a low-code Schema Builder, and a friendly UI for rich editing. These tools support efficient migration and ongoing content management. (Source)
Hygraph enables global content governance through shared backend infrastructure, granular permissions, and region-specific content management. This approach streamlines processes and maintains brand consistency across markets. (Source)
A headless CMS like Hygraph allows for flexible scaling, omnichannel delivery, and reusable content models, reducing developer dependency and supporting modern workflows. (Source)
Hygraph's friendly UI enables business users to manage the full content lifecycle independently, reducing reliance on developers and accelerating adoption of new workflows. (Source)
Proper documentation ensures knowledge transfer, supports onboarding of new hires, and reduces the risk of losing critical information during migration. It is essential for long-term success and minimizing tech debt. (Source)
Productivity savings can be estimated by multiplying the number of people, their average salary, the percent of time spent on tasks before migration, the percent reduction post-migration, and by 50% to estimate captured savings. Example: (5 marketers) x ($70,000) x (25%) x (80% less time) x (50%) = $35,000 annual savings. (Source)
Hygraph's Content Federation enables companies like BioCentury to combine data from multiple sources and deliver content types efficiently, resulting in up to 80% faster publishing compared to legacy systems. (Source)
Establishing global standards for content governance, documentation, and training ensures consistency, reduces tech debt, and supports efficient scaling across markets. (Source)
Hygraph offers an eBook titled "The True Cost of CMS Migration" and a comprehensive documentation hub with guides, tutorials, and case studies to support successful migration. (Source)
Hygraph offers GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, enterprise-grade security, user-friendly tools, Smart Edge Cache, localization, asset management, and cost efficiency. (Source)
Yes, Hygraph integrates with Digital Asset Management systems (Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Imgix, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot), Adminix, Plasmic, and supports custom integrations via SDK, REST, and GraphQL. (Source)
Hygraph offers Content API, High Performance Content API, MCP Server API, Asset Upload API, and Management API. These APIs support efficient content querying, mutation, asset management, and project structure. (Source)
Hygraph's high-performance endpoints are designed for low latency and high read-throughput. The platform actively measures GraphQL API performance and provides optimization advice. (Source)
Hygraph provides extensive documentation covering API reference, schema components, references, webhooks, AI integrations, and more. (Source)
Hygraph is praised for its intuitive UI, ease of setup, and ability for non-technical users to manage content independently. Real-time changes and custom app integrations further enhance usability. (Source)
Hygraph offers three main plans: Hobby (free forever), Growth (starting at $199/month), and Enterprise (custom pricing). Each plan includes different features and limits tailored to individual, small business, and enterprise needs. (Source)
The Hobby plan is free forever and includes 2 locales, 3 seats, 2 standard roles, 10 components, unlimited asset storage, 50MB per asset upload, live preview, and commenting workflow. (Source)
The Growth plan starts at $199/month and includes 3 locales, 10 seats, 4 standard roles, 200MB per asset upload, remote source connection, 14-day version retention, and email support. (Source)
The Enterprise plan offers custom limits, scheduled publishing, dedicated infrastructure, global CDN, security controls, SSO, multitenancy, backup recovery, custom workflows, and dedicated support. (Source)
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant (since August 3, 2022), ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure high standards for data security and privacy. (Source)
Hygraph uses granular permissions, audit logs, SSO integrations, encryption at rest and in transit, regular backups, and dedicated hosting options to protect customer data. (Source)
Yes, Hygraph is GDPR compliant, ensuring adherence to data protection and privacy regulations for customers in the EU and globally. (Source)
Hygraph is ideal for developers, product managers, content creators, marketing professionals, solutions architects, enterprises, agencies, eCommerce platforms, media companies, technology firms, and global brands. (Source)
Industries represented in Hygraph's case studies include SaaS, marketplace, education technology, media, healthcare, consumer goods, automotive, technology, fintech, travel, food & beverage, eCommerce, agency, gaming, events, government, consumer electronics, engineering, and construction. (Source)
Notable success stories include Samsung building a scalable API-first application, Dr. Oetker managing digital experiences across 40 countries, Komax achieving 3x faster time to market, AutoWeb increasing monetization by 20%, BioCentury accelerating publishing by 80%, and Voi scaling multilingual content across 12 countries. (Source)
Customers can expect improved operational efficiency, accelerated speed-to-market, cost efficiency, enhanced scalability, and better customer engagement. Case studies show tangible results such as 3x faster launches and 15% higher engagement rates. (Source)
Implementation time varies by project. For example, Top Villas launched in 2 months, and Si Vale met aggressive deadlines with a smooth initial phase. Hygraph's onboarding process and resources support quick adoption. (Source)
Hygraph offers a free API playground, free developer account, structured onboarding calls, training resources (webinars, videos), extensive documentation, and a community Slack channel for support. (Source)
Hygraph is the first GraphQL-native Headless CMS, offers content federation, enterprise-grade features, user-friendly tools, and proven ROI. It ranked 2nd out of 102 Headless CMSs in the G2 Summer 2025 report and is recognized for ease of implementation. (Source)
Hygraph eliminates developer dependency, modernizes legacy tech stacks, ensures content consistency, improves workflows, reduces costs, accelerates launches, simplifies schema evolution, and enhances localization and asset management. (Source)
Hygraph integrates multiple data sources without duplication, providing a single GraphQL API for consistent content delivery. This approach addresses conflicting needs and simplifies integration, setting it apart from platforms that rely on REST APIs or manual data duplication. (Source)
Hygraph ranked 2nd out of 102 Headless CMSs in the G2 Summer 2025 report and has been voted the easiest to implement headless CMS for four consecutive times. (Source)
Written by JingÂ
on Nov 13, 2023Technology debt is the cost incurred by the quick fixes and workarounds made to speed up development now that add a complexity tax to development work down the line. It’s an expected growing pain of business, but if steps aren’t taken to minimize tech debt, it can quickly snowball into major costs to team productivity, maintenance needs, and the performance and scale of your applications.
Tech debt is a challenge that increases as digital business gets more complex. In a 2018 survey by the payment platform Stripe, developers reported spending 33% of their time on technical debt. In a 2020 survey by the research firm McKinsey Digital, CIOs reported that tech debt amounted to 20 to 40% of the value of their entire technology estate. A 2023 survey by the service provider SoftwareOne found that 72% of organizations are behind on digital transformation due to tech debt.
This article will look at common sources of tech debt to watch out for when migrating to a new content management system (CMS), ways to measure and monitor the impact of debt, and proactive measures teams can take to minimize debt during migration.
Proactively managing debt as part of your migration strategy leads to a smoother transition and lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the new content solution. Here are four common sources of tech debt to watch out for when planning your CMS migration.
Untangling the existing web of content isn’t always easy. It takes coordinating with multiple departments to understand what assets, data, and workflows are used across the business. A planned migration without this full content picture often leads to one-off fixes down the line and misses out on opportunities to simplify and standardize processes globally.
Once a business decides that there are strong enough reasons to replatform to a new CMS, it’s important to make sure that migration isn’t just a lift-and-shift of problems from one platform to the next. Too many teams waste time and resources moving over outdated assets, duplicate data, and unused features. Or recreating complex workflows that require ongoing maintenance of outdated tools instead of using the new CMS capabilities to improve working methods.
There have been big advances in business software in the past few years, but due to time pressure and skills gaps, some companies end up moving to these modern tools without fully capitalizing on what they have to offer. Such as continuing to use monolithic approaches to data and integrations and missing out on the flexible scaling of the Cloud, still thinking in a page-based mindset when using a headless CMS so that assets aren’t set up for reuse and personalization, or creating a publishing process that still requires developer intervention instead of making sure business users can manage the full content lifecycle through a friendly user interface (UI).
Changes to content management can impact multiple teams with a range of technical literacy. If training and employee adoption are treated as an afterthought, it can be a painful transition process or, even worse. All migration work is done just for people to default back to old working methods. Additionally, if the initial migration team doesn’t properly document knowledge, it can be hard to ramp up new hires and risks losing critical information if someone leaves.
Attaching financial and business value to tech debt is key to being able to prioritize and allocate funds to managing it. While it’s hard to get an exact measurement of debt’s impact, here are a few ways to evaluate and communicate the cost of current debt and the value of improvements made.
Tools like SonarQube and Teamscale can be used to scan code for issues like unused code, undocumented code, duplication, test coverage, and security vulnerabilities. Comparing these metrics month over month can help to highlight the “interest rate” of existing tech debt.
For a deeper look at measuring tech debt via code quality, check out this study that saw a 90% smaller tech debt growth rate when moving from monolith to microservices.
Attaching a dollar amount to productivity can be useful when justifying the need for a different solution and, once the migration is done, to prove the value of the new platform.
One way to get an estimate of costs saved due to productivity is to multiply the number of people working on a specific task, the average salary of those people, the percent of their time spent on that task before migration, the percent reduction in time spent on the task post-migration, and by 50% to estimate that half of the time saved will be captured as costs saved.
Example
Annual Loss Expectancy (ALE) is a straightforward calculation to show the financial impact of known security, compliance, and performance risks that tech debt contributes to. ALE is the Single Loss Expectancy (SLE) of an event multiplied by the Annualized Rate of Occurrence (ARO) of that event.
Example
Depending on where tech debt has caused the most frustration, monitoring improvements to impacted systems can be a good way to represent progress on debt.
These can be trackable metrics in ticketing tools like Jira, such as number of bugs reported, mean time to resolution (MTTR), full cycle time for projects, and rate of new features released. As well as site performance metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates, and page speed. Even big-picture stats around developer retention, number of missed deadlines, amount of steps in the content workflow, and time to onboard new hires can be useful to illustrate the impact of tech debt on the business.
Here are 5 ways to minimize tech debt in your CMS migration project and improve performance, scalability, and lower maintenance costs down the line.
Changes to the CMS will impact multiple teams, and it’s useful to have a group of representatives from different departments aligned on key milestones and goals.
This group can help in the planning process by giving insight into how content is currently used, identifying challenges, and pledging resources for migration tasks. They can also ensure a smooth transition by helping to create global standards for content governance, knowledge documentation, and training colleagues in their department on the new ways of working.
Take a look at existing assets and data to find the ROT (redundant, obsolete, trivial) that doesn’t need to be moved over.
For the remaining data, map out where it lives, who owns it, the content types that use it, and the relationship between data sets. Having a good understanding of how data supports different processes is particularly important when moving from a monolithic to headless CMS, as legacy data models may not map 1:1 to a headless approach and will need to be tweaked when migrated.
Evaluate the content workflows happening across the business to see where capabilities overlap, what outdated tools are causing frustrations, and how processes can be simplified with the new CMS.
The German food and beverage company, Dr. Oetker, uses a headless CMS to manage the digital experience of 40 countries from one content platform. The backend infrastructure is shared globally while each market still has the freedom to create unique frontend experiences, with granular permission set up to ensure that content editors only see the products, content, and data that are relevant to their region. This setup makes it easier to keep the brand consistent, streamline business processes, and roll out global updates at a fast pace.
Getting the most out of a headless CMS requires breaking out of a page-based mindset and designing content models for omnichannel businesses.
A composable content strategy defines a set of reusable content models, like a “blog post model” or “call to action model,” that can be reused and displayed in many different ways across many different channels. This modular approach allows developers to quickly build solutions for current use cases, with the flexibility to add and adjust individual models to meet future needs. It also lets business users mix and match content components to create unique experiences without needing the help of a developer.
For a look at how a composable model works in practice, have a look at this example of content components for a news website.
The ever-increasing scope of digital experience means that content will likely rely on data from multiple applications and external sources. To avoid future tech debt, these sources need to be brought together in a way that minimizes maintenance-heavy integrations and resource-intensive batch processings.
Hygraph Content Federation simplifies data management by making all data available through a single GraphQL API. Data continues to live in the original source, with Hygraph grabbing the most up-to-date information from each system as it’s requested. Giving companies a way to efficiently manage how data flows between frontend customer interactions and backend systems.
The biotechnology publisher, BioCentury, uses Content Federation to combine data from multiple remote sources to deliver academic articles, news, analysis, research collections, visualizations of real-time data, and many other content types to their subscribers. Enabling an 80% faster content publishing time compared to their old system.
Whether you’re planning on a big bang CMS migration or taking a gradual approach, Hygraph offers tools and support for a smooth transition:
For more information on successfully switching your content platform, have a look at our eBook: The True Cost of CMS Migration.
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