About
The American Medical Association (AMA) is a premier organization dedicated to empowering physicians, residents, and medical students throughout their careers.
It provides a comprehensive platform for educational events, resources, and stakeholder engagement, aimed at addressing and overcoming systemic health disparities.
A Strategic Platform Migration For Public Health Communication
The American Medical Association (AMA) needed a reliable, secure, and maintainable digital platform to support its growing portfolio of public health campaigns and resources. Axelerant partnered with AMA to consolidate 10 independent WordPress and Drupal properties into a single, governed Drupal 11 platform hosted on Acquia Cloud.
From stakeholder alignment to deterministic migrations, accessibility remediation, and editorial workflow training, the engagement focused on building a long-term editorial product rather than just delivering a one-off site migration.
AMA’s web ecosystem was fragmented across 10+ WordPress and Drupal sites, each carrying unique campaign content and resource tools. This created a set of problems that threatened editorial efficiency and long-term maintainability.
Operational Fragility And Security Risk
A plugin-heavy WordPress estate introduced significant risk through inconsistent update cycles, security vulnerabilities, and performance issues. Maintaining multiple CMS instances led to growing technical debt and inconsistent governance.
Unstructured Content And UX Fragmentation
WordPress content models were informal and plugin-generated, with little consistency across properties. This made it difficult to enforce a unified editorial workflow, introduce accessible components, or ensure a coherent user experience across campaigns.
Accessibility And SEO Deficits
AMA's existing sites lacked semantic markup, consistent metadata, and ARIA compliance, directly impacting accessibility and discoverability. These issues reduced reach and undermined trust in public health communications.
Multi-Stakeholder Alignment
Multiple internal stakeholders owned different parts of the ecosystem. Any consolidation strategy had to begin with stakeholder interviews, shared governance design, and agreement on a unified content model before technical execution.
Axelerant delivered a multi-phase engagement focused on product quality, editorial safety, and operational scalability. The goal was to go beyond content migration and build a governed, extensible platform for future public health communication.
Discovery And Stakeholder Alignment
- Conducted an inventory across 10 sites to map content structures, SEO metadata, and accessibility issues.
- Aligned AMA teams on a shared UX model and content governance principles.
Structured Migration To Drupal 11
- Used the Drupal Migrate API and CSV transforms to convert WordPress posts into structured Drupal content types and media entities.
- Validated all migrations through QA runs and parity checks to ensure fidelity of mission-critical content.
Accessibility-First Component Design
- Rebuilt page templates with semantic markup, responsive images, ARIA support, and keyboard navigation.
- Applied site-level SEO enhancements using Metatag and consistent schema.org annotations.
Editorial Reusability And Governance
- Introduced a reusable component library and structured content types to allow editors to compose pages with consistent, accessible layouts.
- Configured role-based workflows and moderation settings to support safe publishing and decentralized content ownership.
Platform Hardening And Hosting On Acquia Cloud
- Implemented Acquia-recommended caching strategies and performance configurations.
- Hardened the configuration with role-based access control and a minimal module footprint to reduce surface area.
- Deployed to Acquia Cloud for managed hosting, scalability, and simplified updates.
Training, Runbooks, And Post-Launch Support
- Delivered editor training and documentation for campaign teams and content owners.
- Provided handoff materials and a hypercare window to ensure stability during the first post-launch period.
The engagement turned a collection of vulnerable campaign microsites into a unified, governed platform designed for safe, scalable communication.
Technical And UX Improvements
- Lighthouse Desktop Performance improved from 24–54 → 98–100.
- Accessibility Scores increased to 95–100 across sampled sites.
- Best Practices and SEO reached 92–100, with some campaigns hitting full scores.
Editorial Efficiency
- Shared components and structured content types reduced page-building time and ensured consistent, accessible layouts across campaigns.
- The approach scaled well: 10 sites delivered in Phase 1, with 5 more in the pipeline.
Cost And Governance Benefits
- Consolidated TCO reduced long-term maintenance burden and security risk.
- Governed platform operations replaced ad hoc plugin updates and multi-platform patching with predictable, centralized management.
Project Highlights
Deterministic, High-Fidelity Migration Across 10+ Sites
Axelerant used the Drupal Migrate API and CSV transforms to migrate content from 10 independent WordPress and Drupal sites into a single Drupal 11 instance. Each content type was modeled to preserve fidelity, and multiple QA cycles were run to ensure critical campaign information wasn’t lost or restructured incorrectly.
This approach turned unstructured WordPress posts into predictable, reusable Drupal entities, laying the foundation for long-term governance.
Consolidated Hosting With Role-Based Governance
The new platform was launched on Acquia Cloud with optimized caching, configuration hardening, and Acquia-recommended security practices. Platform stability and deployment workflows improved significantly. Instead of managing multiple plugin-heavy WordPress sites, AMA now maintains a governed Drupal instance with predictable update cycles, centralized logging, and scalable hosting.
Accessibility & SEO-Driven Template Redesign
Each migrated site underwent a full redesign of its templates to meet modern accessibility and SEO standards. The team implemented semantic HTML, ARIA attributes, proper heading structure, keyboard navigability, and responsive image handling. Metatag configurations and schema enhancements further improved discoverability.
Post-migration Lighthouse reports showed measurable improvements across Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO—some sites jumping from 50s to perfect scores.
Shared Component Library For Editorial Consistency
To reduce manual effort and improve editorial consistency, Axelerant implemented a reusable component system using Drupal block types. Editors can now build pages using drag-and-drop components styled and validated for accessibility, mobile responsiveness, and brand consistency.
This enabled faster publishing workflows, while ensuring every campaign page adhered to UX and accessibility standards.
Ask anything about how we ran American Medical Association - or what it would look like for you.
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