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A content migration 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.
The decision to replace your content management system is rarely made in haste and usually comes after numerous pain points and frustrations have boiled over to become damaging to the business.
As you begin down the CMS selection path and planning your migration, there is one part of the process that should not be overlooked in terms of its importance and opportunity: your content migration.
Contrary to some beliefs, a content migration is not merely lifting and shifting your archive in a like-for-like manner from the old system to the new one. When done right, a content migration is the best time to assess your content, clean it up, and improve its usability to deliver endless value.
At Glide Publishing Platform we've done countless content migrations, from national newspapers to small independent publishers, and have built up a crucial knowledge base in how to do it well.
Through these experiences, we’ve worked with publishers to effectively transform tens or even hundreds of thousands of aged articles from being barely usable and having no commercial life into renewed long-tail content that readers re-engage with and have had a significant impact on site authority.
"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 a 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."
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 spiraling costs and busted deadlines but ensures you avoid lost opportunity with the new CMS. Here is how we recommend you approach that plan.
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.
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.
Essential questions for this group to consider include:
These are all significant business questions which tie directly to real business risks. The key to ensuring your content migration doesn't turn into a cautionary tale lies in knowing what to focus on.
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 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 volume and condition of your existing content. With a clear picture of how many articles, images, entities, authors, content types etc. you have, you can start to estimate the best approach and timetable.
This is when to decide what to take with you and what should be left behind. To make this stage manageable, identify and prioritise the current highest-value content first - those pieces still bringing in traffic, supporting SEO, or are crucial to your site’s authority - and move those first. No need to try and eat the whole pie at once.
A content migration isn’t limited to assessing what content to move, but also to work out what content 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 know what your archive looks like and are 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 your team may have decided to add.
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 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.
Automating migrations in this manner not only massively speeds things up but significantly reduces the opportunity for error.
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 the 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.
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. By pre-planning and using your content migration as the opportunity to assess your content structures, rather than executing a direct lift-and-shift, you will not only vastly improve the usability and value of your existing content, but set your teams up for continued success with your new CMS.
We’ve successfully helped publishers migrate from open source systems like Drupal and WordPress, other traditional platforms, and custom in-house solutions to Glide CMS. 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.
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.
Want to learn more about Glide CMS and our content migration process? Book a call to speak to a Glide product specialist.
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