The engagement had two distinct phases, each with its own critical requirements.
For a publicly traded Canadian financial services company, EN/FR bilingual content was not a feature request - it was a legal compliance requirement. WPML on WordPress at this scale is not a plugin install. It requires URL structure decisions that cannot be changed after launch, translated content relationship management across product and regulatory pages, locale-specific taxonomy structures, and editorial workflow configuration for teams managing content in two official languages simultaneously.
Phase one: WPML multilingual implementation across the Lifeco corporate site, with the same architecture extended to Canada Life and London Life. Every URL structure decision, translated content relationship, and hreflang configuration had to be right before the migration could be planned - because migrating a misconfigured WPML installation to AEM would compound every error across both platforms.
Phase two: content migration from WordPress to Adobe Experience Manager. AEM uses a completely different content repository model from WordPress. Years of structured content, product pages, regulatory documents, editorial metadata, and taxonomy relationships had to be mapped from WordPress’s data architecture to AEM’s content model without losing field mappings, breaking French content relationships, or corrupting structured data that regulatory and compliance teams depended on.
The approach that made the migration work was sequencing. WPML had to be implemented correctly before migration planning could begin, because the content relationships established during WPML configuration determined what the AEM field mappings needed to accommodate.
WPML Multilingual Architecture
Language pair configuration for EN/FR across all three brands, with URL structure decisions made at the start - not bolted on after the fact. Hreflang tag output validated to ensure English and French content registered as distinct language variants in Google rather than duplicate content. Localized URL structures configured per brand, with string translation setup for theme and plugin text outside the CMS.
Edit Flow Editorial Workflow
Edit Flow configured across the Lifeco editorial team to manage multilingual content through the publication workflow. Bilingual content requires coordinated editorial processes - English and French versions of regulatory and product pages moving through approval stages together, not independently. The workflow configuration matched how the editorial team actually operated, not a generic content management model.
Custom REST API Layer for Content Extraction
A custom REST API layer built to expose WordPress content in the structured JSON format required by AEM’s content import process. Clean JSON output with consistent field mapping across all content types, translated content surfaced correctly through WPML, and internal linking relationships preserved so AEM received content that was architecturally coherent, not just a flat export.
Staged Migration with Validation
The migration methodology: map the data structure first, migrate in staging, validate against the AEM content model, then go live. Each brand - Lifeco, Canada Life, London Life - went through staging validation before production migration. Canada Life and London Life followed the Lifeco playbook, which held because the architecture was right from the start.
Content Relationship Preservation
Taxonomy relationships, internal link integrity, product-to-regulatory document associations, and editorial metadata all transferred intact. The most common failure mode in WordPress-to-AEM migrations is content that arrives in AEM as isolated pages with broken internal relationships. The REST API layer was designed specifically to prevent this by surfacing relationships explicitly in the JSON output.
Post-Migration Verification
Each brand verified for content completeness, relationship integrity, bilingual content pairing, and URL resolution before the WordPress environments were decommissioned. Nothing was decommissioned until the AEM environment passed full verification.
The Lifeco corporate site, Canada Life, and London Life all migrated from WordPress to Adobe Experience Manager with structured content, bilingual editorial metadata, and taxonomy relationships intact. Canada Life and London Life followed the same playbook as Lifeco because the methodology held the second and third time through.
The migration worked because the architecture was right from the start. WPML implemented correctly before migration planning meant the content relationships in WordPress were clean enough to map directly to AEM. The REST API layer meant AEM received structured, relationship-aware content rather than a flat database dump that had to be reconstructed on the other side.
For a publicly traded Canadian financial services group, content migration at this scale carries regulatory and compliance implications that go beyond technical correctness. Regulatory documents, product disclosure pages, and bilingual compliance content had to arrive in AEM exactly as they existed in WordPress - not approximately. They did.
💼 WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION
Considering a WordPress to AEM Migration or WPML Implementation?
The Great-West Life engagement is the reference architecture for enterprise WordPress-to-AEM migrations and WPML multilingual implementations in the Canadian financial services sector. The methodology - content architecture before migration planning, custom REST API layer for structured content extraction, staged validation per brand - transfers directly to any organization managing complex WordPress content across multiple brands or official languages.
