Introduction
Migrating one CMS to another is a massive task, especially when switching between two headless architectures. Conversing headless frontend components can involve significant changes to rewrite logic, data mapping, and integration patterns. In the end every bit of help counts in making this process more efficient and faster.
In this article you’ll find out how AI-powered tool can assist in migrating frontend components to Headless Optimizely.
Why AI for migration
In a few words: speed and consistency.
You always want to reduce time for migration and you want to make sure all components are not written/migrated in different styles.
For migrations you'll want to rebuild presentation logic to align with the new framework, improve code with best practices and latest standards etc. AI tool can offload much of this rework by leveraging its AI capabilities to generate or refactor components based on prompts or previous examples. It helps by:
- Automating repetitive patterns
- Applying best practices to new components
- Enabling rapid iteration with a human-in-the-loop model
- Learning from your existing migrated files to improve consistency
So which AI tool should be used?
Vercel v0
AI tools are constantly emerging to help writing code faster, smarter, and more consistent. Fortunately for migration to Optimizely we have a perfect candidate to use - Vercel v0. It's a perfect match, because Vercel is partnered with Optimizely, which gives it much more credibility to use it in real life scenarios.
Vercel says that "Vercel v0 is a pair programmer that lets you describe your ideas in natural language and generates both the code and UI for your project". What does that mean for our case? In very short, it means that it can greatly accelerate migration and can give consistency across all components with the same results. It can be super valuable during large-scale frontend migrations.
Using examples for learning
One of the best benefits of v0 is its ability to learn from examples. After you've manually migrated a few components (more complex the better), you can use those files as reference points for generating components.
How? Simple - you’ll have to include both old and new component files with descriptions of the changes, add next component files to migrate and in prompt write for example “migrate component X in the same way as in examples of component Y”. Of course you can phrase it however you want.
After you get the initial result you can use the v0 prompt further to adjust generated files to your liking. For example you could add modern practices like hooks or performance optimizations. This is an important step for v0 to learn logic in migration of other components.
Manual work
No matter how powerful AI will be, not every component will be migrated perfectly, especially complex ones involving deeply nested logic, third-party integrations, or CMS-specific traits. It’s the same for v0, so manual work will still be required. However, the more components you fine-tune and give as examples, the more robust your result becomes, allowing you to reuse those improved files as guides for the rest.
This creates a compounding effect - every migrated and manually refined component becomes a seed that improves the speed and quality of subsequent generations.
Manual work is also the reason why you’ll still need experienced developers to do the work, or at least help and overview the whole migration process.
Conclusion
Everyone who migrated anything will agree that migration is huge, complex and time-consuming work. Thankfully with modern AI tools like Vercel v0 the process can become much easier and faster.
Even if an AI tool won’t do all the work for you, if it helps at least a little, it’s most likely still worth it to use it for migration and to accelerate the whole process by making what once felt like a mountain of work much more manageable.
Contact us if you need a help with content migration in your organization.