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Is a CMS migration in your future? Learn the proven strategies and common mistakes to avoid from the experts who've been there for a smoother, more effective CMS transion.
Let’s be frank. Media organisations don’t decide to migrate to a new CMS for fun. The decision often comes as the culmination of mounting frustrations - slow editorial workflows, ballooning maintenance costs, increasingly complex workarounds, rigid templates stifling engagement, and content performance that no longer keeps pace with audience expectations.
If you’ve reached that point, you’re not alone, and you’re in the right place.
We spoke with experts at Glide Solutions Partners Centralsoft, code.store, and Versatile Content along with our own professional services team to capture their most important CMS migration do’s and don’ts.
Whether you’re moving off a homegrown system, a bloated DXP, or another headless CMS, their guidance will help set your migration up for long-term success.
Let's dig in.
Once an organisation decides to migrate to a new CMS, the instinct is to immediately start the vendor evaluation process: demos, comparison charts, proposal requests.
Our experts unanimously agree: This is exactly the wrong place to start.
According to Dibran Isufi, CEO of Switzlerland-based Centrasoft, most CMS migrations are born inside “chaotic environments” - expired licenses, unsupported systems, or urgent technical debt. In these moments, teams rush straight into solution-buying mode. “Proper planning sounds obvious and simple,” Isufi says, “but almost nobody does it, or does it the right way.”
Instead, teams should begin by documenting what Isufi calls the first principles:
This discovery phase should be roughly 30% of the entire migration timeline advises Lauren Hightower, CTO of US-based Versatile Content, and should include a real analysis of workflows, architecture, SEO and accessibility requirements, integrations, and content taxonomy.
Good planning not only clarifies the business goals, it also prevents teams from overestimating the difficulty of migration. With proper scoping, the effort is far less than most people think.
Strategy before software is the foundation for a fast, clean, and successful migration.
The fastest way to waste your new CMS investment - treat it as a purely technical “lift and shift”, replicating the same structures and workflows from your old CMS into the new one.
“Whatever you do, don’t do a lift and shift,” Hightower warns. “Doing so means you’re going to inherit all the problems you had with your old CMS and site.”
This mistake happens for one of two reasons:
The truth is, a CMS migration isn’t just a platform switch, it’s an opportunity to rethink how your content is created, structured, used, and distributed. Done right, migrating to your new CMS will not only streamline editorial processes, but boost SEO, improve content distribution, unlock new product capabilities, and position your business for long-term success.
Skipping this step simply reproduces the pain you’re trying to escape and leads us to our next ‘Do’ - content hygiene.
Each of our experts said the same thing: content cleanup is the single biggest time-saver and risk reducer in a migration.
Arthur Murauskas, CTO of France-based code.store notes how frequently they encounter publishers with hundreds of thousands of tags, many of which are duplicates, outdated, or improperly structured. “When this baggage is moved into the new CMS,” says Murauskas. “The migration slows down, data quality deteriorates, and the new system becomes polluted from day one.”
Taking the time to clean your content before migrating:
Our experts recommend to decide with discipline what actually needs to be carried over to the new CMS. Many publishers maintain outdated content formats such as video-only articles or community articles that once had a purpose but now only add complexity. These can often be merged into a unified content model.
The cleanup process varies depending on the source system:
And as code.store notes, “SEO must be involved on day one”. Some of the most painful and expensive migration issues occur because SEO requirements, especially redirects and URL structures, were discovered too late.
Think of content cleanup as your first major migration milestone. It directly determines how smoothly the rest of the project will go.
For more on how to approach your content migration, check out our guide Content migrations 101: What every publisher needs to know before making a CMS switch.
While content cleanup often focuses on the editorial hygiene discussed above, the real migration complexity lies in the technical transformation between systems. Content that seems straightforward in your source CMS often requires complete restructuring when moving to the new system.
Consider these common scenarios: an image stored as an absolute URL in your legacy system needs to become a managed asset reference in the new CMS. A hardcoded HTML snippet that worked perfectly fine must be converted into a structured, reusable component. Embedded widgets for Flash or other deprecated technologies need complete replacement. Broken internal links, malformed HTML elements, and custom markup all require careful attention and transformation.
These structural mismatches between source and destination systems create hidden scope that can derail timelines and budgets. A single article might contain multiple technical migration challenges: reformatting embedded media, restructuring custom layouts, updating deprecated HTML, and converting proprietary shortcodes into standard components.
A significant migration pain point is when teams discover well into the project that their "simple" content transfer actually requires extensive data transformation, custom migration scripts, and manual cleanup - work that wasn't visible during initial scoping.
“What looks like a simple content transform on the surface often hides dozens of technical transformation decisions,” notes Adisa Halilovic, Content Migration Specialist at Glide. “Too often it isn’t until mid-migration that teams discover that their 10,000 ‘simple’ articles actually represent 50,000 distinct technical choices that need to be made.”
The solution is to perform a technical content audit alongside editorial cleanup. Before migration begins, sample content to identify structural patterns, field mapping challenges, and transformation requirements. “Since content structure evolves over time, when conducting your audit, make sure to include samples from different years to gain a picture of the elements used and their placement,” advises Halilovic. “Without this temporal sampling, major transformation patterns can be easily missed.”
Content management systems today aren’t just a place where editors type stories, it’s a structured system where content flows into components, modules, and reusable elements across every channel.
Hightower emphasizes that thinking in components is one of the most powerful shifts an organisation can make. “Thinking about your website in terms of components and reusability will save you a lot of money, time and effort,” she says.
Why components matter:
This approach encourages teams to treat content as code: structured, versioned, trackable, and reusable across channels and formats.
Versatile Content’s advice: start with a smaller, intentionally selected set of components. Learn which ones create real business value, then expand strategically. Avoid component sprawl.
Redesigning your site while migrating your CMS may feel efficient, but it almost always creates chaos.
Redesign involves decisions about layout, UX, components, branding, and user journeys. Migration involves decisions about modelling content, mapping data, and rebuilding workflows. These are separate, interdependent tracks.
Combining them leads to:
Our experts advocate for a clear sequence:
“You don’t have to implement the redesign right away,” notes Hightower, “but the designs should be finalised before your CMS implementation begins.”
This prevents costly rebuilds and ensures the CMS is structured to support the experience you actually want to deliver.
Teams love big ideas: personalisation, AI tagging, new formats, new products, new workflows. All of these may be important, but not during migration.
Centralsoft emphasises that migrations should focus on bringing over the fundamentals first - the core content types, key workflows, and must-have functionality.
“Don’t overcomplicate it. Get into the new system with the most important feature set,” Isufi says.
Examples of what should not go into your first migration phase, especially if you don’t have this functionality already:
All of these can be implemented later, after the core migration is complete and the old system is shut down.
Versatile Content reinforces this principle: teams should get comfortable thinking in phases and avoid cramming everything into launch.
code.store also notes that although long-term architecture and scalability matter, they should be built iteratively. The target system needs a defined content model for migration, but the full architecture doesn’t need to be over-engineered up front. In other words: launch clean, then scale.
Not all CMS platforms handle migration complexity the same way, and understanding this difference is critical to setting realistic expectations. Some systems expose clear interfaces for content ingestion, placing the responsibility for transformation and cleanup squarely on the exporting side. Others accept data in its original shape and handle migration intricacies as part of the import process.
Neither approach is inherently better, but the distinction matters. If a migration feels remarkably smooth and transparent, it may mean the complexity has been deferred rather than resolved. Data might be ingested "as is" without the necessary transformation, cleanup, or restructuring, problems that will surface in broken layouts, inconsistent formatting, or editorial friction.
Transformation work is unavoidable. The only question is who does it and when. A migration that requires upfront data preparation may feel more demanding initially, but often results in cleaner, more maintainable content in the new system. Conversely, a platform that promises to "handle everything" during import may be masking complexity that will require cleanup post-migration.
“We’ve seen too many migrations that felt effortless during the transfer phase, only to create months of cleanup afterward,” says Nedim Dedic, Glide's CTO. “A smooth migration isn’t necessarily a successful one if the hard work was just pushed to the other side of go-live.”
The key is transparency. Ask your migration partner or CMS vendor explicitly:
A CMS migration is far more than a technical project, it’s a pivotal moment that shapes your digital publishing future. By grounding your project in strategy, cleaning your content, adopting reusable components, and resisting the urge to overbuild, you dramatically increase the likelihood of a smooth, successful migration.
“The biggest challenge in CMS migrations isn't technical, its alignment,” says Dženita Vejsilović, Head of Content Engineering at Glide. “When developers understand that you are not just moving content but transforming how the business creates value, and when editors focus on the features that actually drive revenue rather than recreating every legacy workflow, that's when migrations succeed.”
Or, as Centralsoft summed it up: “Focus on the boring fundamentals first. Then you can migrate.”
Whether you’re exploring migration readiness, evaluating CMS platforms, or need hands-on guidance our solutions partners and Glide’s professional services team can help.
Contact us today to get started. We’ll help you get where you need to go.
Centralsoft
A Switzerland-based solutions partner specialising in complex content migrations, architecture design, and scalable publishing workflows. Known for helping major European publishers transition off legacy and custom-built CMS platforms.
Code.store
Based in France, code.store’s digital engineering team is specialising in large-scale headless CMS implementations and high-volume content migrations. Operating in Europe and worldwide, they bring deep SEO, data transformation, and structured content expertise.
Versatile Content
A U.S.-based consultancy specialising in custom software development and technical strategy for complex CMS migrations to help organisations modernise their content platforms with tailored migration solutions that account for editorial workflows, data integrity, performance, and long-term scalability.
Glide Professional Services Team
Glide’s in-house experts who have supported dozens of enterprise CMS transformations, migrations from legacy and custom-built CMS platforms, and modernisation projects across the media industry.
No matter where you are on your CMS journey, we're here to help. Want more info or to see Glide Publishing Platform in action? We got you.
Book a demo
