Guide · updated
Edge Delivery Services migration: when to rebuild instead of migrate
Moving AEM 6.5 to AEM as a Cloud Service usually means converting what you have. Edge Delivery Services offers a different route for some sites: rebuild the front end on a lighter model and keep, or simplify, the authoring. For marketing sites with dated components, a rebuild can be cheaper than a conversion. For complex, integration-heavy sites it usually is not.
How Edge Delivery Services works
- Pages are built from blocks: small units of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Adobe's AEM Boilerplate on GitHub is the usual starting point, and a Block Collection provides reference blocks.
- Two authoring routes: document-based authoring in Microsoft Word or Google Docs (spreadsheets become JSON for things like navigation and data), or authoring in AEM as a Cloud Service with the Universal Editor, published to Edge Delivery Services.
- Performance is a design goal: Adobe's guidance is to keep a mobile Lighthouse performance score of 100, and its GitHub bot can fail a pull request that drops below it.
Which sites suit a rebuild
| Signal | Leans to Edge Delivery rebuild | Leans to Cloud Service migration |
|---|---|---|
| Components | Mostly simple content components, many dated or Foundation-based | Rich, interactive components with business logic |
| Authors | Comfortable in Word or Google Docs, or happy with Universal Editor | Rely on page editor workflows, launches and complex permissions |
| Integrations | Few, mostly client-side | Server-side integrations, personalisation, commerce, forms with back-end logic |
| Content model | Pages and simple metadata | Content fragments, experience fragments, MSM and translation at scale |
| Goal | Speed to launch and Core Web Vitals | Feature parity with minimal change for authors |
Deciding per site
- Run the readiness scan or Best Practices Analyzer and list components per site.
- Score each site on the signals above with the people who author it.
- Prototype the two or three most-used templates as blocks; time it.
- Compare total cost: rebuild plus content move, against conversion plus testing, plus three years of running costs.
- Mixed estates are normal: rebuild the marketing sites, migrate the transactional ones.
Adobe also offers AI tooling for Edge Delivery migrations (the Experience Modernization Agent); our guide to Adobe's AI migration tools covers what it does and where it stops.