I remember the moment one of Air IT's marketing team said, quietly, "that site is basically dead - you can probably just delete it." We'd been in the audit for about a week. I nodded, made a note, and then pulled the traffic data. That "basically dead" site was driving 4,200 organic visits a month and had backlinks from fourteen industry publications. Nobody had looked at the analytics in over a year.
That moment - right there - is why you audit before you decide anything.
Air IT came to us with thirteen websites, seven different CMS platforms, and thirteen sets of hosting arrangements, editorial workflows, and analytics accounts. Some of the brand guidelines were documented. Most weren't. They'd grown through acquisition, fast, and each acquired business had brought its own digital estate with it. The websites were telling thirteen different stories about what was supposed to be one company.
If you're running a firm that's grown through acquisition, some version of that probably made your stomach tighten. Maybe it's four sites, or six. The numbers are different but the feeling is the same: you know it needs sorting, you've known for a while, and every quarter it doesn't get sorted, the mess compounds.
We've talked about consolidating for years. It's always been too complicated to start.
I've heard that from operations leaders at probably a dozen firms. And here's what I'd say back: the complexity is real. Some of it went sideways for us. But the firms that keep deferring aren't wrong that it's complicated - they're wrong that waiting makes it less complicated. Every acquisition, every additional site, every month of diverging content and accumulating technical debt makes the eventual consolidation harder. You're not buying time. You're borrowing it at a terrible rate.
We didn't walk in on day one with a migration plan. That would have been reckless. We spent the first phase doing a proper audit of all thirteen sites - traffic, backlinks, content quality, technical setup - and the consolidation plan we had at the end of it was meaningfully different from the one that had seemed obvious at the start.
The "basically dead" site was one example. There were others. Pages flagged by stakeholders as critical that had received eleven visits in six months. Content that looked like duplicates but had been independently edited after the acquisition, so two versions existed that were almost-but-not-quite identical, with conflicting service descriptions. One site had a blog that nobody had touched in three years, but three of its posts were ranking on page one for terms Air IT genuinely cared about.
You can't make those calls without data. And guessing is how you lose organic traffic you spent years building.
The audit took about six weeks in total - longer than people expect, and longer than we'd initially scoped. Worth every day of it.
We migrated one site at a time, each within a roughly two-week window. We started with the simplest, lowest-risk site first. Not the biggest, not the most strategically important - the one where we'd learn the most with the least downside if something went wrong.
This isn't playing it safe. It's building institutional knowledge. The process we used for migration number twelve was dramatically more efficient than the one we used for migration number one, because every phase taught us something. Starting with the most complex migration first would have been like learning to drive on a motorway.
The platform decision was WordPress, but designed specifically to absorb future acquisitions using the same migration process. That last bit mattered. Air IT wasn't done acquiring. Building a platform that could only handle the current thirteen would have been short-sighted.
The SEO preservation strategy. Thirteen domains' worth of organic search equity - backlinks, domain authority, indexed pages - all needing to survive the consolidation intact. A comprehensive 301 redirect strategy covered every URL across every legacy site. We mapped content structures carefully, making deliberate decisions about what was migrated, what was consolidated, and what was retired.
Redirect mapping is the kind of work that's invisible when it's done well and catastrophic when it's done badly. I've seen firms treat it as an afternoon's work. It isn't. The cost of doing it properly is small relative to the cost of recovering lost organic traffic after a botched domain migration - and that recovery, if it comes at all, can take 12 to 18 months.
We were meticulous. It still threw up edge cases we hadn't anticipated. Canonical tags, analytics reconfiguration, tracking continuity across thirteen sets of historical data. There was one afternoon, about halfway through, where we discovered that three of the legacy sites had been cross-linking to each other in ways that weren't documented anywhere, and the redirect logic we'd built didn't account for it. We caught it before it went live. Just.
The content migration was messier than the audit had suggested. Content that looked straightforward - same topic, similar structure across multiple sites - turned out to have all sorts of hidden complexity when we got into it. Different terminology for the same services. Conflicting information. Content that had been duplicated and then independently edited, so deciding which version to keep, or whether to rewrite entirely, ate time we hadn't fully budgeted for.
But the harder thing, honestly, was the people.
When you consolidate thirteen acquired brands into one, you're asking people to give up something that feels like their identity. The teams at those acquired companies had built those websites. Some of them had built those brands. There was one conversation - I won't name the business - where the head of marketing at an acquired firm had been with the company for eleven years. She'd built the website herself, originally. She knew every page. And we were telling her it was being retired.
We'd framed it carefully. We'd talked about the unified brand, the better analytics, the reduced overhead. All true. She sat there, nodded, and then said: "So everything I built just disappears."
That's not a technical problem. That's a change management conversation, and if you're not prepared for it, it'll derail you. What worked, eventually, was giving her a genuine role in shaping how her content lived within the consolidated site - not just informing her, but involving her. She ended up being one of the stronger advocates for the new platform by the time we launched. But I won't pretend it was smooth getting there.
80% reduction in support costs. 60% increase in SEO visibility. No measurable loss of organic traffic across the consolidation. Those are the headline numbers, and they're good.
But the number I'd actually lead with is zero - as in, zero separate analytics accounts. For the first time, Air IT's leadership could see the full picture of their digital performance in one place. Decisions that used to require pulling data from thirteen different accounts and trying to reconcile it in a spreadsheet could now be made from a single dashboard. That compounds in value every month.
And when Air IT acquires the next business, they already have a playbook for bringing them in.
A few things I'd tell you, kept specific because generic advice on consolidation is basically worthless:
Audit before you decide anything. The plan that looks right before the audit is almost certainly wrong in important ways. Do the work.
Phase rigorously and start with the easiest one. Not the most important, not the biggest - the one where you'll learn the most with the least downside. Build the process before you stress-test it.
Get executive sponsorship with actual authority. A consolidation that requires acquired brand owners to give up "their" website is a change management programme. If the person sponsoring it doesn't have the authority to make the difficult calls when stakeholders push back - and they will - the programme stalls. I've seen it happen.
Plan explicitly for the content quality problem. Almost every multi-site estate contains content created under different standards by different people with different ideas about what "good" looks like. The consolidation forces a quality decision. Make it early, with clear criteria, before you're under time pressure and making calls on the fly.
If you want to understand what a consolidation of your specific estate would actually require - in timeline, cost, and programme complexity - we run a digital estate consolidation assessment that gives you a clear picture before you commit to anything. Or just book a conversation. I've been through this enough times now to know what the realistic version looks like, and I'm happy to tell you straight.