From messy to meaningful: a new corporate website in 12 weeks

After more than 20 years on CoreMedia, Deutsche Bahn rebuilt deutschebahn.com in under 12 weeks. Since launch:

• Traffic to bahn.de, where passengers buy tickets, has more than tripled
• ChatGPT and Gemini now regularly cite deutschebahn.com as a first source
• Traffic to the DB Museum site is now six times more than before

Relying on CoreMedia for more than two decades

Deutsche Bahn carries nearly two billion passengers a year, but its websites serve many more audiences than travelers alone. Logistics customers, investors, business partners, and job seekers each have dedicated portals, including DB Cargo, DB Jobs, and the ICE portal. These portals have run on CoreMedia for more than 20 years, through steady traffic growth and repeated optimizations without a platform change.   

At the end of 2025, a change at the top of the group set off a company-wide fresh start, and the corporate website had to reflect it quickly. That raised a question with a tight deadline: what should the corporate website of a railway that is reorganizing itself look like?

Corporate websites that grow over many years tend to follow the same pattern. Each department wants a place on the homepage, and the site ends up organized around the company instead of the people visiting it. Over time, Deutsche Bahn's corporate website had gained a press area, a news blog, a kids' page, a podcast, and a social media wall, until the homepage carried three news teasers saying much the same thing.

To bring the focus back to visitors, the team let the data lead. They analyzed where visitors came from, which pages they opened, what they searched for, and where they left. The data showed what each audience needed most. The largest group of visitors ended up on the careers page, so careers got a quick link at the top. Many others had landed on the corporate site but actually wanted a ticket, so a direct route to bahn.de moved up. Journalists now find press contacts and media packages on the homepage, and content that visitors rarely used moved down or came out.

The data also shaped how content is presented. Each business unit now appears with key figures, such as passenger numbers, placed where AI systems can pick them up and cite them.

Because the new structure was designed based on visitor data, the team could check it against the same data after launch. The numbers show a strong impact, with more traffic reaching the places that matter and visitors finding answers faster:

• Visitors search less. On-site searches fell to almost ~20%, a sign that visitors find answers without having to search for them.
• Visitors stay longer. People who stay on the site now spend more time (19% longer than before) with its content.
• International visitors find their way in. After its redesign, the English site drew significant more traffic.
• A link to the DB online merch shop lifted the traffic to the shop by 25%.

A complete relaunch of a site like this, with a new structure, a new homepage, and a new design, usually takes far longer. Deutsche Bahn did it in 12 weeks, entirely in-house and on the system it already had: the CoreMedia CMS. With no migration needed, the team took advantage of the flexibility of the platform and put all its time and energy into the new site.

The key to this speed was CoreMedia's building-block system. Content is managed as modular, structured pieces, such as articles, images, and key figures, separately from how they are displayed. After 20 years on CoreMedia, Deutsche Bahn already had these building blocks. So although deutschebahn.com now looks completely different, the team only had to arrange existing content in a new order and layout instead of rewriting it. Fewer rewrites meant fewer approval rounds and faster launch.

A core team of six with clear responsibilities, including colleagues from DB Systel, Deutsche Bahn's internal development team, built the new site. The team keeps improving the site in a continuous cycle of analyzing, testing, and analyzing again, letting visitor data guide every next step. By combining data and content this way, the team keeps making deutschebahn.com better for the people who use it.