Board International – content management at enterprise scale

The client

Board’s platform sits at the heart of financial and operational planning for more than 3,000 organisations across 19 countries.Their platform  combines AI, analytics, and enterprise technology in a single system. An impressive customer base includes Volkswagen, BASF, Mitsubishi, Kimberly-Clark, and Kraft Heinz; organisations that approach technology decisions carefully and expect a lot from the platforms they rely on.

So when Board decided their website needed a fundamental change, they treated it with the same excellence they bring to everything else. This is the story of how we helped them move from an ageing Drupal 7 platform to a modernised WordPress website built to serve a global marketing operation. It’s one of the most ambitious migrations we’ve delivered.

The Drupal 7 problem

Drupal 7 had served Board well for some time, but by the time they approached us it had been announced that it was reaching end of life. That alone would have forced a decision for most organisations, but the most significant driver was what the platform had quietly cost the team for years: content updates that required developer involvement, a fragmented system of tools rather than one cohesive CMS, and a publishing experience that created friction for a marketing function with serious global output requirements.

Drupal and WordPress serve really different purposes, and it’s worth being clear about that. Drupal has real strengths, particularly for highly customised application-level builds where developer control is the priority. But for Board’s brief (editorial flexibility, multilingual publishing, a CMS their global marketing teams could genuinely own and operate without constant developer support) WordPress was the right platform. It has the ecosystem maturity, the publishing experience, and the long-term commercial sustainability to match the ambitions of an organisation operating at Board’s scale.

The brief: global scale, local freedom

Board didn’t just need a faster, more modern website. They needed a content governance model that could serve marketing teams across multiple countries and languages simultaneously, whilst keeping their brand consistent.

It’s an important balance to strike for marketing teams of more than one or two people. A system that empowers local teams to tell stories that resonate in their own markets, whilst keeping the brand strong and recognisable, regardless of department or locality.

The answer was a component-based design system, delivered as thirty custom Gutenberg blocks. These weren’t generic, interchangeable content modules. Each block was designed with Board’s visual language built in, so that a content editor in Germany or Japan could open the CMS, pull from the available block library, and build a page that felt local in tone and content whilst staying entirely on-brand. The blocks provided the creative freedom. The design system provided the boundaries that made that freedom sustainable at scale.

This is one of the things WordPress does exceptionally well when it’s built with care. A well-architected block library is a curated toolkit rather than a blank canvas. Teams can say what they need to say, to the audience they’re speaking to, within a system that protects and communicates the brand.

How we approached the migration

Moving a content-rich, multilingual enterprise website between platforms is not a task that rewards rushing. Content integrity, URL structures, SEO equity, and editorial workflows all need to survive the transition intact. Each of those represents a risk if it’s not planned properly.

Our approach to taking on complex, large-scale website migration projects is built around front-loading the risk. Before production work begins, we run thorough content audits and test migrations so that problems surface early, when they’re manageable, rather than late in the project when they become expensive and time-consuming to unpick. We treat the migration phase as an opportunity to clean up what’s being moved across, rather than simply replicating existing structure as-is.

For Board, this meant working closely with their team to understand which content was actively serving them. In total, more than 11,000 pieces of content and assets made the journey from Drupal to WordPress, each mapped, checked, and migrated with URL structures and SEO equity preserved throughout. It’s the kind of methodical, detail-oriented work that rarely makes it into a launch announcement, but it’s what determines whether a site performs as well six months after launch as it does on day one.

The build

The project’s scope was pretty considerable. Alongside thirty custom Gutenberg blocks, the build encompassed ten custom post types covering case studies, partner content, recognition, resources, events, webinars, videos, guides, and careers. With job listings updated automatically via API.

The multilingual architecture was delivered through WPML, serving English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. Accessibility was built to WCAG 2 AA standards throughout. Performance was addressed at infrastructure level with specialist caching, with SEO foundations and security layering also built in.

The project closed with three structured virtual training sessions, covering the Gutenberg block library in phases alongside admin features and editorial workflows. All recorded so they can be referred back to and used to train future team members across the globe.

The result

When the site launched, Board had a fast, accessible, multilingual platform that their teams could actually use. The feedback from the client was direct: the site was noticeably faster, content was quicker and easier to edit than anything they’d experienced with Drupal, and there was genuine enthusiasm about what they’d be able to build on top of the foundation. That last point is one of the better indicators of a project that’s landed well. A marketing team that’s excited to use their CMS is a marketing team that’s enabled to keep on improving their website.

Board’s product helps some of the world’s largest enterprises make confident decisions by giving them clarity across their data. It’s fitting, then, that their website is now built on a platform their own teams can navigate with the same confidence. Clear structure, consistent governance, and the freedom to tell their story in whichever market they’re speaking to.

Projects like this are what our enterprise WordPress development work is built for. Not just migrating a platform, but solving an organisational problem that had been getting in the way of a talented marketing team doing their best work.