The machine built to re-platform 190 brand sites.

Diageo owns some of the most recognisable drinks brands in the world, among them Guinness, Smirnoff, Baileys, Don Julio and Aviation Gin, plus 190 brand websites spread across a range of different CMS platforms.

All of them needed re-platforming. Several teams of developers were going to do the migrating, which meant the real deliverable was not any one site. It was the tooling those teams would use.

At 190 sites, hand-checking is not an option, and neither is silently losing content. Metadata, alt text and page content all had to survive the move intact and be provably identical afterwards, across brands with different content models and different source systems.

We led the creation of the tooling: data mapping, code generation, testing tools, and crawlers that compared the old and new sites and verified that content, metadata and alt tags matched.

We were responsible for implementing Guinness.com as the test project, which is where the tooling and the target architecture got proved on a real brand before the other teams picked them up.

What we handed over was a migration capability. Several teams of developers had the tooling to do the moving, on Contentful and Next.js, with automated verification catching what human review at that volume never would.

Our record covers the four months we were on it and what we built in that time. It does not track the estate afterwards, so this page says nothing about how many of the 190 have since landed.