American Medical Association Website Consolidation

The Client

The American Medical Association (AMA) is the largest association of physicians and medical students in the United States, providing health policy guidance, medical education, and public health resources to audiences nationwide.

The Situation

The American Medical Association needed to consolidate seven campaign and resource sites that had become operational and security liabilities on WordPress. These were mission-critical channels for public health guidance, but operating them as multiple WordPress properties was threatening the trust and reliability that AMA's audience relied on.

The challenge went beyond a one-off migration. AMA needed a governed, reusable platform that would protect the brand and reduce platform risk, materially improve accessibility and performance, enable editorial scale and consistency, and consolidate into a single Acquia-hosted platform to lower long-term costs and operational overhead.

The Challenge

Operating seven WordPress properties at this scale created three compounding problems: operational fragility and security risk, uneven experience and discoverability, and editorial friction. Specifically:

• Unstructured legacy content: WordPress posts and plugin-generated structures required mapping to robust Drupal content types and Media entities.
• Distributed ownership and UX fragmentation: Multiple stakeholders with differing site requirements demanded intensive discovery, alignment, and governance design before migration could begin.
• Plugin-driven performance and security issues: The WordPress plugin ecosystem created maintenance and vulnerability risk at scale, a primary driver for consolidation.
• Accessibility and SEO deficits: Templates and metadata had to be rebuilt to meet accessibility standards and semantic SEO needs.

The Solution

AMA tapped Acquia partner Axelerant to approach the consolidation as product and stewardship, not a one-off migration; the goal was to build a governed, reusable platform that preserved content fidelity, improved accessibility and performance, and made editorial work predictable and safe.

Ten WordPress campaign and resource sites were migrated into a single, governed Drupal 11 environment on Acquia Cloud, progressing through six closely connected workstreams.

Discovery and stakeholder alignment: Axelerant conducted a full inventory across the seven sites, mapping content, taxonomy, and SEO metadata, aligning stakeholders on a unified UX and governance model before any migration work began — a critical step given the distributed ownership and differing site requirements across the estate.

Deterministic migration and content modeling.  Next, the team converted unstructured WordPress posts and plugin-generated structures into Drupal 11 content types and Media entities using the Drupal Migrate ecosystem, with CSV transforms and validation runs ensuring content parity throughout.

Reusable front-end and editorial tooling: The team then introduced a shared component model and block types so editors could assemble pages using low-code components and consistent, accessible patterns, drastically reducing manual layout work and establishing the repeatable model AMA needed for future campaigns.

Accessibility-first templates and performance engineering: The team remediated template-level accessibility issues — covering semantic markup, ARIA, and keyboard support — while applying performance practices such as responsive images, cache metadata, and edge-friendly outputs.

Governance, security, and hosting: The team configured role-based access control, content moderation, and editorial workflows, and applied platform hardening per Acquia and Drupal recommendations. Acquia Cloud Platform provided a managed, scalable hosting environment that simplified staging, deployment, and security management, reducing maintenance overhead and improving operational stability.

Handover and operational continuity: Finally, Axelerant closed out the program with editor training, runbooks, and a hypercare window — ensuring stable post-launch operations and giving AMA's teams the confidence to manage the platform independently.

The Results

The project turned a set of fragile campaign sites into a well-governed editorial product for public health communications. Axelerant’s approach delivered verifiable technical gains, reduced platform risk, and gave AMA a scalable editorial engine that preserves trust and enables faster, safer public health campaigns.

Lighthouse and accessibility improvements: Post-migration, multiple sites reached 98–100 Performance on desktop and 80–86 on mobile, up from 24–54. Accessibility climbed to 95–100 across sampled sites, with several hitting 100. Best Practices reached 96–100 on multiple sites, and SEO improved and stabilized at 92–100.

Repeatable publishing and reuse: Shared components and structured content types reduced manual page composition and increased consistency across the sites, allowing editors to assemble pages quickly and reliably. Phase 1 delivery proved the approach; reusable components and centralized governance reduced the marginal effort for Phase 2 sites, with a further five sites in the planned pipeline.

Consolidated TCO: The reusable component model, a governed codebase, and Acquia-managed services directly addressed the business case for consolidation: lower maintenance, fewer plugin dependencies, and predictable updates — resulting in substantial annual TCO reductions compared to managing a fragmented multi-site WordPress estate.

Reduced security exposure: Consolidation into Drupal on Acquia and governed module usage reduced the known attack surface and created a predictable update cadence, replacing the vulnerability risk of the plugin-heavy WordPress estate.