Government Agency Outcome
When Legacy Platforms Modernize,
Integrate, and Secure, Agencies Scale.
BinaryWorks migrates agencies onto supported platforms without losing search authority or a year to manual copying. Recovery time becomes a number you have actually tested.
Sound Familiar
The Platform Still Runs.
That Is Not the Same as Supported.
Agency CIOs and IT directors raise these when a budget cycle is approaching. The platform has not failed yet. That is the whole reason it is hard to fund.
“We run twenty-two sites on six different platforms. Nobody ever planned it that way.”
“We relaunched last spring and search traffic still has not come back to where it was.”
“Our page load times have doubled since the last redesign. Traffic went up thirty percent.”
“The vendor who wrote our custom modules closed years ago. There is no documentation at all.”
“We have backups. Nobody in this building has ever actually tested restoring from one.”
“Two staff have been copying pages into the new CMS by hand since last March.”
What Is Actually Broken
Why Legacy Platforms Look Fine
Until They Do Not
Six gaps below. Each one is a risk that stays invisible on a status dashboard and shows up in a procurement or an incident.
01 · Every New Service Becomes Another Microsite
Why it happens: The platform cannot accommodate a new content type or a new template without a developer and a release window. So each program buys its own site, and the agency ends up running twenty of them on six platforms.
The result: Every microsite is another login, another patch cycle, and another way into your network.
02 · Migrations That Lose What the Site Earned
Why it happens: Redirects get treated as a launch-day task rather than a migration requirement. URLs change, structured data is dropped, and the new site launches with none of the search authority the old one had accumulated.
The result: Residents cannot find services that were perfectly findable the week before the relaunch.
03 · Performance That Degrades as Demand Grows
Why it happens: The stack has no caching layer, queries were never optimized, and images are served at full size. Load times were acceptable at launch and get worse every year as traffic and content both grow.
The result: Growth makes the service worse, which is the opposite of what a platform should do.
04 · Core Nobody Patches and Code Nobody Reads
Why it happens: The platform version stopped receiving community security releases, and the custom modules were written by a vendor that no longer exists. Nothing is documented, so every change carries risk nobody can size.
The result: The safest option becomes changing nothing, which is how a platform reaches end of life.
05 · One Server and No Plan for Failure
Why it happens: There is no staging environment, deployments happen over FTP, and the site runs on a single instance with backups nobody has restored. No incident runbook exists, so a bad day becomes a bad week.
The result: Recovery time is unknown until the first outage, which is the worst moment to learn it.
06 · Content Migrated by Hand, Page by Page
Why it happens: Nobody built a migration path, so staff copy and paste thousands of pages into the new system. It takes two years, half the content arrives broken, and the old site stays up the entire time.
The result: You pay to run two platforms while the migration nobody scoped drags across budget cycles.
Platform Risk Audit
Quantify every legacy risk
in 48 hours.
Most agencies know the platform is old. The Platform Risk Audit puts a number on each exposure and sequences the work by the cost of waiting.
- Platform and dependency risk map
- Recovery time and backup test
- Fixes ranked by cost of delay
How We Fix It
Six Capability Areas,
One Modernization Roadmap
Modernization is not one project. It is a sequence, and the order decides whether you carry the risk for one budget cycle or three.
Six areas · one sequenced roadmap
/ 01 · Redesign
One platform with a component library flexible enough that a new program gets a section, not a separate site. Microsite sprawl stops because there is no longer a reason for it.
/ 02 · AI Visibility
Redirect mapping, schema, and URL structure treated as migration requirements rather than launch-day cleanup. Rankings and citations carry across to the new platform instead of resetting to zero.
/ 03 · CRO & Growth Marketing
Load times, completion rates, and call volume recorded on the old platform before it comes down, then targeted in the new build. Performance stops degrading as traffic grows.
/ 04 · Development & Migration
Migration to a supported version, with custom modules rebuilt as documented code or replaced by contributed equivalents. Every module that survives migration comes with documentation the next team can read.
/ 05 · Maintenance & Security
Staging, versioned deployments, redundant infrastructure, and backups restored on a schedule so the recovery time is a known number. An incident runbook exists before anyone needs it.
/ 06 · AI Automation
Content migrated by script with mapping rules, validation, and a rollback path. Thousands of pages move in weeks, and nobody spends a year copying and pasting into a new system.
Practice Lead Session
Your Platform,
Priced by Risk.
Tell our government practice lead what you are running and how long it has been unsupported. You leave with each exposure sized and ranked.
THE BINARYWORKS ADVANTAGE
Why Agency Teams Choose Us
Integrators sell you a platform and move on. BinaryWorks migrates the code, proves the numbers, and stays to run it.
Building Public Sector
Platforms
CMS Builds
Delivered
Agencies Switch to Us
From Other Vendors
Platform Risk
Audit Turnaround
Hear From Our Customers
Results BinaryWorks Has Engineered for Government Agencies
State Transportation Agency Modernizes Citizen Portal, Boosting Online Permit Completions by 42%
A state transportation agency’s legacy citizen portal created usability issues, accessibility violations, and inefficiencies in managing service content. Upgrading to Drupal 11 was essential for modernization.
County Health Department Boosts AI Search Visibility, Increasing Citizen Service Inquiries by 34%
A county health department’s service pages disappeared from AI search responses, reducing citizen access to public health information and services.
City Administration Cuts Permit Processing Time 54% With AI Automation Across Workflows
A city administration’s staff spent the majority of working hours on permit processing, FOIA request handling, and citizen inquiry responses. These workflows now run through AI agents without human intervention, returning staff to complex citizen cases requiring judgment and discretion.
Your Questions Answered
A single-platform migration for a mid-size agency site is usually 700 to 1,600 development hours. Content volume matters less than the number of custom modules and integrations that have to be rebuilt. At $75 to $300 per hour, that is the planning band the audit narrows.
Four to eight months on a typical agency site, and no, you do not need a freeze. We migrate in tranches, keep both platforms serving during the overlap, and cut over section by section. Cutover windows are minutes, scheduled overnight, and rehearsed on staging first.
Risk alone rarely funds a migration, because nothing has broken yet. What moves a budget committee is a cost of delay. Hours lost to workarounds, incidents already absorbed, and the price of the same work next cycle. The audit produces that number in a form you can present.
Yes, and it is usually the better route through procurement. Phase one is the platform and the highest-traffic sections. Later phases move the rest. Each phase closes real exposure, which means a stalled budget cycle leaves you better off than you started rather than half migrated.
BinaryWorks serves US government agencies with development at $75 to $300/hour depending on project scope. Platform modernization and migration engagements are scoped as fixed-price phases. Bundled programs across platform, content, and search are available. FTE models suit agencies that need ongoing dedicated capacity.
All three stay with you. We build into the hosting environment your agency has authorized, and the authorization stays with your provider and your security office. Code, configuration, and the runbook transfer at handover. Nothing we build requires us to keep running it.
Not usually. Most agencies on Drupal or WordPress are running an unsupported version, not the wrong platform. A version migration keeps your editors on tools they know and costs a fraction of a platform change. We recommend switching only when the platform genuinely cannot do the job.
Recovery time actually tested, unsupported components remaining, patch latency, deployment frequency, and page performance at peak. Service completion and call volume carry across from the old platform, because a migration that improves infrastructure and hurts residents is not a success. Baselines are recorded before the old platform comes down.
Building the Strongest Platform for Your Agency Starts With One Conversation.
Tell us which platform version you are stuck on and why. We size every exposure and put a number on another year of waiting.
