Transferring your site content to a new CMS is more than just a technical problem; it’s a business decision. Getting your site migration properly configured can cause a boost in performance, SEO, and ultimately position your digital experience for the future.
If your migration goes wrong, it is possible to break links or user journeys and lose traffic. Migration planning is essential whether you’re updating, rebranding, or going ‘headless.’
Unless planned out properly, planning migration can spiral out of control.
In this blog, you will find an easy-to-read, no-fluff guide to ensuring your website content migration goes smoothly and stress-free, from inception to implementation.
We will break your CMS migration project down as simply as possible and make your website migration a force for good instead of a distraction.
Step-By-Step Guide to CMS Content Migration
Step 1. Define Your CMS Migration Strategy
Let’s start with the reasoning behind the migration. Are you moving to a new CMS for reasons of scalability, security, performance, ease of use, or those reasons collectively? Set your goals and objectives. This is a good way to determine your CMS migration plan based on the REAL needs of your business.
Your plan should have:
- Goals: Speed, Performance, Better user experience, etc.
- Scope: Are you migrating just blog posts or all digital assets?
- Team: Who is going to deal with the work, your in-house web developers or a web development agency?
You should also think through what the limitations of your previous CMS are. What are things your old CMS cannot do? If you are developing a headless CMS migration strategy you will want get ready for more technical alignment between the front-end and back-end teams.
Step 2. Take Inventory of Your Content
Then, put together an exhaustive content migration checklist. Think of lists of pages, list of posts, lists of media files, lists of PDFs, lists of meta descriptions, lists of internal links, and the lists go on and on. This is your first step in developing a content migration checklist.
You can use crawling tools such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or even an export of your sitemap to get some visibility on how much content you are migrating to the new URL. Export it to a spreadsheet, and then you can remake your lists.
For each entry, be sure to include:
- Current URL
- Content type
- Metadata
- Priority (Must move vs. Archive)
This will help to ensure you are not missing any pieces and also allow you to determine if you wish to grab anything separate that is outdated or duplicate.
Step 3. Audit and Optimize Before Moving
Migration is a good opportunity to clean up. Perform a total content audit on your site and review for poor content, poor structure, and poor SEO performance. Removing content that is out of date, thin, or irrelevant.
Here are a few things to keep an eye out for:
- Low performing pages (bounce rate, time on page )
- Content that has missing meta or poor formatting
- Broken internal links
- Unused media files or duplicated media
Cleaning now means less clutter later, but you are also doing a more efficient and bad structured data migration in a CMS. If you are relying on custom development services, make sure you ask your development partner to optimize the schema and/or metadata before you move.
Step 4. Choose the Right Web Development Partner
Unless you have an existing internal web development team that has experience with migrations, you should consider hiring a web development firm that specializes in CMS migration. An experienced migration partner can communicate an effective migration process and follow CMS migration best practices.
The ideal web development agency will:
- Understand your existing tech stack and future direction
- Support custom setups
- Facilitate data mapping and manage URL redirection
- Manage QA and post-launch tracking
Agencies offering web development solutions should also ensure that accessibility, performance, and mobile readiness aren’t compromised during the move.
Step 5. Map and Structure Your Data
CMS data migration involves more than just textual content. Considerable complexity arises when migrating content types, taxonomies, and design elements while preserving their relationships. This is where the migration can easily go wrong.
Follow this step-by-step guide to CMS content migration:
- Map existing CMS content types (e.g., blog posts, landing pages, FAQs) to new CMS content types
- Map existing CMS fields (e.g., title, slug, body, image)
- Map relational data (e.g., authors, tags, categories)
- Consider if you have localization or multilingual data
For structured data migration in CMS, align your schema markup at the outset to better support SEO and ensure data remains machine-readable after the migration.
Step 6. Back Up Everything
First and foremost, you should not move content before you make a complete backup of your existing site. You want to be able to roll back if necessary. Backups need to be kept secure, and you need to check if things are operational as well.
Back up:
- Databases (SQL, MongoDB, etc.)
- Media files and assets
- CMS configurations, custom code
- SEO settings and redirects
Your trusted web development agency in USA or internal IT team is responsible for the backups. At the very least, they should run and validate the backup. Consider setting up automation where possible.
Step 7. Test Migration in a Staging Environment
Test migration before you go live. A test migration is a good way to discover formatting mistakes, broken links, data mismatches, and misplaced media.
In your test environment, check for:
- Consistency of URL structure
- Redirects (301s) for old pages to new pages
- Design conformity and look across browsers and devices
- Load speed and Core Web Vitals
- What parts of the form functioned, and what embedded media functioned and did not
Be sure to document your errors and build your CMS migration strategy based on actual experiences rather than assumptions.
Step 8. Finalize Redirects and SEO Settings
URL changes often come as a result of CMS migration. If you don’t use redirects, you could lose traffic, and your SEO rankings could drop.
Make a redirect map with the following:
- Old URLs matched to new URLs
- Priority 301 redirects are in place
- Updated sitemaps submitted to Google
Consider updating also:
- Meta titles and descriptions
- Canonical
- Open Graph
- Robots.txt and xml sitemap
If you do this correctly, you will allow Google to re-index your site quickly and correctly without losing domain authority.
Step 9. Go Live with Confidence
Once everything has been validated and approved, schedule your go-live in a low-traffic window (generally late nights or weekends). Have your dev team on standby to fix any surprise bugs as they come up.
When launching:
- Deploy changes in increments if you can.
- Use monitoring tools, of course (Google Search Console, Hotjar, New Relic, etc.)
- Communicate your project change to your internal team and stakeholders.
- Test user journeys that are most critical (forms, checkout, login, etc.)
A soft launch with limited access can also be a great way to find any last-minute bugs before a full launch.
Step 10. Monitor and Optimize Post-Migration
Post-launch, your work isn’t finished. By monitoring site performance after migration, you can identify early-stage performance issues, broken pages, traffic declines, and so forth.
You should monitor any 404 errors and bounce rates, crawlability and indexation, keyword rankings and traffic fluctuations, page speed and uptime
Set error alerts and user feedback loops on your newly migrated site. Use analytics and heatmaps frequently to monitor user engagement.
Record your continued iterations of your new site if you should you work with a web dev company. Great web developers don’t just end at a migration and launch, but evolve along with your business objectives.
Conclusion
Website content migration shouldn’t be turmoil or risky; it’s all about being smart with how you plan it out. From defining your content migration strategy to making optimizations after it’s live, each and every piece is important!
The goal of migration is not only to migrate your content, but also to migrate it in a way that you improve what it does, how findable it is, and how it is experienced by users.
Whether you plan to do the move in-house or hire a reputable web development agency, preparation is your advantage.
Consider using this workbook and checklist to keep you on task, reduce pain points, and get ahead of the CMS migration as a competitive advantage, not just a tech project.
