Website migration costs are going to zero

What happens when AI makes website migrations almost free? Ten predictions for CMS vendors, agencies, Open Source, and buyers choosing their next CMS.

Within three years, I expect the technical work of moving a website from one platform to another to cost close to nothing.

The existing site gives the agent a reference implementation. It can crawl matching URLs, diff the rendered HTML, compare screenshots, and, given admin access, run the same publishing workflows to check content changes, moderation states, and permissions.

Comparing the two systems under equivalent inputs is called differential testing. Agents work well when they can check themselves against tests. The existing site provides the baseline.

Some of these changes are not new, but cheap migrations could push them much further:

When leaving is easy, vendors, agencies, and Open Source projects have to give users a reason to stay. Even if only half of this comes true or meaningfully accelerates, that is a lot. A lot will depend on how quickly people adopt AI and how well they use it.

AI is not killing the CMS. It is unbundling creation from control. That may replace the CMS for simple publishing, but makes it more important wherever content is shared, reused, approved, or trusted.

AI makes content authoring and page building faster, while making the foundations beneath them more important: content models, permissions, workflows, APIs, compliance, and trust.

AI agents favor software they can easily install, run, change, and verify. Open Source software has a structural advantage over proprietary software, but only token-efficient Open Source projects may get chosen.

Join 5,000+ readers. I'm the founder of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia. I write about Open Source, AI, and the future of the web, with a focus on building, scaling, and thinking long-term.