Migrating a Credit Union's Member Website from Kentico 13 to Xperience by Kentico

About the client

The client is a mid-sized, member-owned credit union in the United States with nearly 100,000 members and a regional branch network. It offers everyday banking, savings and certificates, consumer and auto loans, mortgages, and business accounts.

The credit union also serves a growing Spanish-speaking community and increasingly relies on digital channels for applications and account servicing.

Client quote

“Our biggest concern was changing the platform without disrupting the parts members use every day. The migration was much smoother than we expected, and the difference for our content team was immediate — rate changes that used to take days can now be reviewed and published the same day.” — Head of Digital Experience, US credit union

Business challenge

The website is where most members log in to digital banking, check rates, find branches, and start loan applications. It gets about 210,000 sessions a month, two-thirds of them from phones. It ran on Kentico 13 with ASP.NET MVC 5 and had grown to 22 page types and 34 custom widgets. The site had become hard to change as the support deadline approached, and the migration couldn't disrupt members or search rankings.

• No one to maintain the code. The original developer had left, and IT wouldn't run a member-facing site without vendor security fixes.
• Rates copied onto 38 pages. A nightly import updated the main rate tables, but editors had pasted static copies onto 38 pages. Each rate change took about two business days, and approvals between the six-person marketing team and the compliance officer went through email.
• Developer tickets for routine content. Near-duplicate widgets and hand-typed application links led to about 16 developer tickets a month.
• No Spanish content, and accessibility gaps. Translation was quoted at ten weeks, and about 1,900 images had no alt text.

Why Bits Orchestra

The credit union's long-time digital agency owned the client relationship, design, and content strategy, but it had no in-house Kentico development team. It brought in Bits Orchestra as a white-label technical partner to own architecture, migration, integrations, and QA.

The agency chose Bits Orchestra for four reasons:

• an official Kentico partnership
• 65+ delivered Kentico websites
• leadership by a former Kentico MVP
• experience using rehearsal migrations to reduce risk

Solution

Migration approach

We combined the Kentico Migration Tool with custom migration code and rehearsed the full move three times.

• Pre-migration audit. The team marked each page, widget, form, integration, and URL as migrate, remodel, rebuild, or retire. The audit also flagged what the tool doesn't carry over, such as macros, page permissions, and form emails.
• Content model. The 22 page types became 10 content types and 3 reusable field schemas. Several content types became reusable Content hub items:
  • rates and products
  • disclosures
  • NCUA and Equal Housing notices
  • a fraud-alert banner
    A rate can't be saved without its APY and disclosure fields.
• Content migration. The Migration Tool moved pages, URL paths, forms, consents, and editor accounts. Media became content item assets. Custom code replaced the 38 static rate tables with references to rate items and mapped old widget properties onto 15 rebuilt widgets.
• Three rehearsal runs. Page-level mismatches fell from 131 to zero blocking issues. Tests covered every legacy URL, loan and account-opening links, the digital-banking login hand-off, and WCAG 2.2 AA. 
• ASP.NET Core front end. Our .NET development team rebuilt the site on .NET 10 with the existing design. The team used KentiCopilot selectively for repetitive code conversion, and senior developers reviewed every generated change.
• Rate governance. A scheduled task turns the core system's nightly rate file into draft rates, which then pass Content review and Compliance review. Once approved, the updated rate is published to every page and channel that references that rate item.
• Headless rates. A lightweight integration service pulls approved rates through Xperience's headless API for the branch-display system.
• AIRA with guardrails. AIRA produced first-pass Spanish translations and image descriptions for staff to review. After launch, the team piloted the SEO & GEO Specialist agent (preview) on selected product pages. AIRA wasn't used for rates or regulated disclosures.
• Security. Editors sign in through Microsoft Entra ID with MFA. Production member data stayed out of development environments, and CMS forms never collect account numbers or Social Security numbers.
• SEO and cutover. URL paths were kept, and alternative URLs became vanity URLs. Branch pages publish BankOrCreditUnion structured data. After a four-day content freeze, cutover took one weekend, and Kentico 13 stayed on standby for a week.

Architecture: Before vs after

Digital banking, the loan and account-opening platform, and the core system weren't changed.

Team

A four-person Bits Orchestra team:

• Kentico technical lead
• .NET backend developer
• front-end developer
• QA engineer

The agency supplied project management and client communication. A second Kentico developer was on standby as backup through migration and cutover.