Axivo had built a functional content management system over the years, serving its users with core CMS capabilities. But like many products that grow organically, the underlying technology had become a bottleneck.

The platform was built as a PHP monolith — a single, tightly coupled codebase where every component depended on every other component. Adding new features meant risking breakage elsewhere. Performance was degrading as usage grew. And the development team was spending more time working around the architecture than building on top of it.

Axivo needed more than a facelift. They needed a full architectural migration that would set the platform up for the next five years of growth — without disrupting the experience their existing users relied on.

This was not a greenfield project. Axivo had existing users, existing data, and existing workflows that could not be disrupted. The migration needed to be invisible to end users while fundamentally transforming everything underneath.

• Language and architecture migration — Moving from PHP to Go required rewriting the entire backend. Every API endpoint, every data model, every business logic function needed to be rebuilt in a new language with a new architectural philosophy.
• Monolith to microservices decomposition — The tightly coupled monolith needed to be broken into independent, deployable services. This required careful domain mapping to determine where to draw service boundaries without creating unnecessary complexity.
• Data migration continuity — Existing user data, content, and configurations needed to migrate seamlessly. No data loss, no downtime, no broken references.
• Frontend redesign without user confusion — The interface was being redesigned alongside the backend migration. The new UI needed to feel modern and improved — not unfamiliar. Users should feel the product got better, not that it became a different product.
• API-first integration design — The new architecture needed clean, well-documented APIs so the frontend and future third-party integrations could interact with each service independently.

We approached this project in three parallel workstreams: architecture planning, UI/UX redesign, and phased migration.

The Axivo CMS was successfully migrated from a PHP monolith to a Go microservices architecture with a completely redesigned frontend. The migration was completed with zero data loss and minimal disruption to existing users.

The new architecture gives Axivo's development team the foundation they need to ship features faster, scale individual services independently, and onboard new developers without requiring knowledge of the entire system.

The redesigned interface, validated through multiple rounds of usability testing, modernized the product experience while preserving the workflows existing users depended on.

• Complete backend migration from PHP to Go
• Monolithic architecture decomposed into independent microservices
• API-first design enabling clean frontend-backend separation
• Redesigned CMS interface with improved usability scores
• Zero data loss and seamless migration for existing users
• Independent service deployment enabling faster feature releases