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Content migrations can easily be the most complex part of a new CMS project. Doing it badly hobbles your new system before it gets going, but doing it well can unlock enormous value from your legacy content and databases. Here are some of the essentials to set you up for success.
The decision to replace a CMS and migrate to a new content management system is rarely made in haste and usually comes after numerous pain points and frustrations have boiled over to become damaging to a business.
A new CMS can sweep away countless newsroom blockers, allow things to happen much faster, and be the touchpaper to rebuild all your audience-facing products or launch new ones.
But whatever the reasons for changing CMS, there is one simple-sounding part of the process which can become anything but simple: content migrations.
At Glide Publishing Platform we've done countless content migrations, from national newspapers to tiny independent publishers, and have built up a crucial knowledge base in how to do it well and prep for success.
Key to our viewpoint is a belief that content migrations are not merely a chance to move archives in a like-for-like status. Content migrations are in fact the best time to fix old problems and improve the usability of archived content to suit new objectives.
"A content migration can be likened to moving to a new house - if you care about what's being moved, the cheapest movers might not be the best," says Glide Chief Product Officer, Rich Fairbairn. "Do you want your movers to throw your possessions in the back of the truck and race off at high speed ignoring all the bumps? Probably not. If a like-for-like migration just takes all your old problems with you, it's a huge opportunity missed.
"For publishers that have been struggling with deteriorating CMS for a while, much of their archive can feel like a dusty basement full of who-knows-what. A good migration though assesses everything, cleans it up, and reassembles all the pieces to make it better than it was before.
"We've worked with publishers who have managed to effectively reclaim tens or even hundreds of thousands of aged articles from being barely usable and having no commercial life to them, into being renewed long-tail content that readers re-engage with and did brilliant things for site authority."
In this guide we outline the steps to take and what to be mindful to make the most of your content migration.
A CMS content migration is the process of moving all your archived and current library content from one CMS to another CMS - like moving all your assets from one bank to another.
On the surface it sounds deceptively simple - move stuff from A to B - but they can be anything but simple. You might have to move and remap millions of pieces of data, where any break in a data chain will cause errors or breakages.
Migrations can create technical headaches, bring up very real business risks, and cause lots of work for editors, developers, and product teams alike. Questions you and they might ask include:
These are all significant business questions which tie directly to real business risks. But understood risks are manageable. The key to ensuring your content migration doesn't turn into a cautionary tale lies in knowing what to focus on and if need be, having a partner who’s done it before, and done it right.
From the moment the decision is made to move to a new CMS you should start crafting your content migration plan. This will not only help everyone stay on track and avoid spiralling costs and busted deadlines but ensures you avoid lost opportunity with the new CMS. Here is how we recommend you approach that plan.
Start with getting the right people in the room early. There should be representatives across editorial, product, engineering, design, and senior leadership, all agreeing on objectives, timelines, and what success actually looks like, and able to respond quickly to questions that need answers.
From the major questions of mapping countless articles to new sites and designs and delivery channels, to the gritty details of how to handle unknown picture credits, tidying tag structures, or which (mis)spelling of an author's name is the right one, having stakeholders who can give a definitive answer quickly is vital.
It also means opening clear lines of communication with your CMS vendor and implementation partner from day one. They’ve likely seen it all before and can help you avoid costly missteps.
Before you migrate a single article, run a full content audit to assess the condition and volumes of what you have. A clear picture of how many articles, images, entities, authors, content types etc. you have, you can start to estimate the best approach and timescales.
This is your chance to decide what you want to take with you, or leave behind. For larger sites with millions of pieces of content dating back perhaps decades, this can quickly become overwhelming and completely stall progress. To make this stage of a content migration more manageable, it is useful to identify and prioritise the current highest-value content first - the pieces still bringing in traffic, supporting SEO, or are crucial to your site’s authority - and move it first, before the next phases of content. No need to try and eat the whole pie at once.
A content migration isn’t just a chance to assess what content to move, but also to work out what needs improving.
Every CMS has its own way of handling content types, metadata, tags, media assets etc., and if you have not yet done so now is the time to think about your structured content models, reusable components, editorial workflows, and more. Keep your new CMS provider or integrator closely involved during this phase and lean on their experience to avoid miscategorising content and other roadblocks down the line.
Some content and workflows improvements commonly addressed during a content migration:
The most pressing fear when migrating content for a new site is the potential for SEO downgrading or loss. A drop in search rankings post-migration can be devastating, and preserving your SEO elements wherever possible - particularly when considering your current URL structure - is really important.
As SEO expert Barry Adams of Polemic Digital puts it: ''It’s important to realise that even a tiny change in the URL - for example, changing from a trailing slash to a non-trailing slash - has the same impact as a radical URL change.''
Any changes should be carefully planned, with 301 redirects in place to ensure that search engines know where to go. But SEO goes beyond URLs: remember to carry over other metadata elements such as image alt text and internal links. These may seem small, but overlooking these pieces can lead to a negative impact on your site’s ranking.
If you’re looking at a wider site restructure or merging of subdomains, make those decisions early but again with good advice from your SEO expert: the sooner you lock down the specifics, the easier the rollout when the time comes to implement.
Manual migrations are notoriously time-consuming, prone to errors, and usually force compromise on quality or speed.
You will know what your archive looks like and be the best judge of where the tipping point is on expediency versus practicality: it usually comes down to numbers and the size of the site you are moving. However, keep in mind that even where article counts are relatively small and it might seem like the editorial team could manually copy the words and pictures for each article, it is all the metadata and business decisions that each article has attached to them which take the time.
What can look like a small number of articles can become a rather large piece of work very quickly when consider all the fields and points of data an article includes, as well as new elements which might need to be added.
The good news is that there are tools and scripts available to do much of the heavy lifting.
At Glide, at a very high level, we break content migration automation into three phases:
The entire process is first done in a sandbox or development environment, where the site structure, content models, and workflows are already in place.
Once everything is running smoothly, Glide’s configuration scripts take over, moving the full setup, including site structure, content types, custom data, and widgets, into the production environment. A round of manual QA follows as standard, ensuring everything is in order before the final migration automations are carried out.
All three need to be executed correctly, but automating massively speeds things up.
No-one wants to learn that something broke during a migration by seeing it break on the new live site. To avoid this, always test in a dev environment first. Start by migrating a small batch of content and run thorough checks. Once you've confirmed everything is working as expected build numbers upwards from there.
Take time to inspect the front-end, review any custom code, and ensure the site looks and performs as it should. Test page load speeds, verify that SEO elements remain intact, and check responsiveness across different devices to make sure content is easily accessible everywhere you expect it to be.
Catching and fixing issues at this stage is far easier and far less stressful than dealing with the failure of a live site.
A shiny new CMS brings new capabilities to the teams using it - but only if you show them what they are. Training should be baked into your migration plan from the start.
Depending on what platform you are moving from, CMS changes can sometimes span generations of tech upgrades, and a team going from an old-style monolithic CMS to a modern headless CMS will arguably experience a bigger change than a team moving from print to digital.
The easy bit for many writers will be where the buttons are; the hard bit can be an overnight move to a system that now publishes to, say, audio, in multiple languages, and lets you add components and widgets that carry out quite complex tasks at the front-end.
So, run tailored training sessions that walk teams through the ins and outs of the new platform so they understand how it works and feels confident using it.
With Glide CMS, we've made this part easy. Every customer gets unlimited editorial training at no extra cost. That cuts the burden on your support team to onboard new hires or contributors, and also encourages experimentation and launches.
We also create custom documentation and training videos tailored to your setup, so your teams can revisit key workflows that may be unique to your organisation at any time. Every Glide customer has access to our Support Portal, and also opt for a shared Slack channel for fast access to support personnel and senior team members.
The work doesn’t end once you go live: now it's time to monitor.
Keep a close eye on SEO performance, page speeds, and user engagement to identify areas for further improvement over time, and ensure everything delivers the results you expect. Compare behaviour pre- and post-migration. The first few weeks are critical for spotting and fixing issues.
Ideally, your CMS partner should support you here and provide enhancements and recommendations to keep your site performing at its best. With Glide, you gain not only a powerful CMS in Glide CMS but ongoing support from our professional services team to help you analyse and optimise your content’s performance long after migration.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach to content migrations. As Rich, notes: ''No two migrations are ever the same, but they are such an opportunity too.''
We’ve successfully helped publishers migrate from open source systems like Drupal and WordPress, other traditional platforms, and bespoke in-house solutions. We're flexible around who does it - whether you handle the work, your partners take the lead, or Glide’s own experts and partners step in. What matters is that you get the support you need and we make it a point to help every step of the way.
Along with the expertise brought by our in-house migration specialists, we often collaborate closely with our SEO expert partner, Polemic Digital's Barry Adams. Barry has been instrumental in many successful projects alongside us, so as a nod to his expertise, we'd recommend subscribing to his newsletter SEO for Google News - it's packed with publishing SEO nuggets, and doesn't cost a penny.
This is the first part of our ongoing migration series.
Stay tuned for the next installment, where we’ll unpack the details of our approach to complex migrations, how we handle large-scale content structures, and help customers improve their content along the way.
Ready to migrate to a new headless CMS and set yourself up for long-term success? Book a call to speak to a Glide product specialist.
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