Planning your content migration: Strategies for success

Content is the cornerstone of your digital identity. It shapes the way you engage with your audience — and, ultimately, drives conversions on your website, apps, and any other touchpoint.

Yet customers and markets evolve, and technologies advance, and so your content also has to transform to keep pace — or you risk falling out of step with your audience’s expectations, and losing the valuable engagement that you worked so hard to build. 

That transformation means thinking about how you create, edit, and publish content, how you address your emerging content challenges, and how you scale your content to keep pace with growth. If your existing content management system (CMS) is starting to show its limitations, or failing to deliver on your content and business objectives, it’s likely time to migrate your content to a new, modern system that can get that job done. 

But content migration requires planning, you’ll need to be prepared for a range of potential obstacles, and understand how to optimize your new CMS to deliver on your digital transformation objectives. 

In this post, we’re going to explore content migration: we’ll define the process, discuss its common challenges, and set out key strategies to make everything smoother. 

What is content migration?

In its broadest sense, content migration refers to the process of moving your entire digital content footprint from one CMS to another CMS. 

But, it’s not quite as simple as that. Brands typically decide to execute a content migration because their existing CMS is limiting them in some way — which also usually means they’re currently using an outdated, legacy CMS, which doesn’t offer the same functionality and flexibility as more modern systems. 

Consider transformation

It’s important to point out that a successful content migration plan shouldn’t just be about exporting and importing data from one system to another, it’s also a process of digital transformation. 

In this sense, brands need to understand certain things about their content, including how it lived in its legacy environment, how it will live in its destination environment, and what will be possible with the tools that the new CMS provides. 

From that transformative perspective, a content migration strategy normally involves two tracks: a technical track in which developers consider how they will extract content in its current format from the existing CMS, and a nontechnical track in which content developers, editors, and marketers consider how to develop a content model for the new CMS. 

Those two tracks converge on the transformation itself, at which point developers will understand how the content will map onto the architecture of the new CMS, and content teams will be able to import it into the new system — and begin working with it. 

The point is, content migration needs to be collaborative. Your migration team should be assembled from technical and nontechnical stakeholders who can create as clear a picture as possible of what you need from the process. 

Why do brands need to migrate content?

Before we look more closely at the details of a content migration, let’s get into the reasons why brands typically decide to leave their legacy CMSes behind. 

Legacy CMS limitations

Legacy content management systems, like WordPress, are monolithic in the sense that they tightly couple their services. In this environment, it’s difficult to separate the backend administration of digital content from frontend content presentation. These systems are also typically all-in-one content solutions; they ship with a range of prepackaged features designed to meet every kind of content management need. 

The advantage of a monolithic, all-in-one CMS is that you know exactly what you’re getting — which means you also know exactly what kind of content experiences you’re going to be able to create for your customers with the technology available to you. Monolithic CMSes are usually built to serve websites, with apps and ecommerce services living in separate silos. The single-touchpoint approach means that you can focus on optimizing for desktop, launching, and fine-tuning new content experiences relatively quickly and easily.  

The problem with legacy CMSes is that they also limit content possibilities. 

That’s because their tightly coupled services tangle content presentation in its underlying code, which makes it more difficult, and slower, to upload and edit content — at least, if you don’t have a certain level of technical expertise. In this environment, any editing or uploading mistakes could disrupt site formatting, which might degrade user experiences and require developer intervention. On top of that, legacy CMSes aren’t particularly good at handling multiple digital content channels, so you’d typically need a different CMS for each channel you publish to (website, app, and so on). 

Monolithic systems also lock brands into the prepackaged functionalities that they’re shipped with and only facilitate changes via authorized updates with very little scope to develop workarounds. 

Long story short, sooner or later, the inflexibility of your legacy monolithic system is going to cause it to fall short of the standards you need it to meet in order to continue to deliver content experiences to your audience — which is when you’ll need to think about content migration. 

Headless, and composable, content possibilities

When brands migrate content from a legacy CMS, it’s normally as part of a transition to a headless CMS, which offers more freedom and flexibility to create unique digital experiences. 

A headless content management system separates its backend administration layer from its frontend presentation layer — also known as the “head.” In this headless environment, you can create, upload, and edit content without worrying about coding and formatting complications, and you can add new features and functionalities — also known as microservices — to the front end, as you see fit. 

In other words, headless CMSes are extensible, which makes them more responsive and scalable than their legacy counterparts, and lets brands work with content in ways that just weren’t possible before. Headless systems provide the flexibility that modern content teams need to keep their audiences engaged, and future-proof their tech stacks as marketing  environments change over time. 

Contentful pushes that extensibility even further, offering a platform on which to build a composable tech stack from modular microservices, which connect via application programming interfaces (APIs) so that you can tailor your digital content experiences down to the smallest detail. There’s much more to say about composability, and the possibilities of moving to a headless CMS, but for now, let’s focus on the content migration process. 

Content migration challenges

So, you’ve decided to embrace the possibilities of a headless CMS — what’s stopping you from executing your migration? As you plan your content migration, you’ll need to be ready for some common challenges.

Feature disparity

Features available in the old CMS might not have direct equivalents in the new system, leading to functionality gaps.

It’s not realistic to expect there’ll be a one-to-one mapping of features between old and new CMSes, and so it’s going to be necessary to identify essential features prior to commencing migration, and then determine how they can be replicated or improved upon in the new system. It may be the case, in a headless CMS, that you can plug in third-party microservices that replicate the old functionalities, but you should plan for the possibility that can’t happen, and have a workaround in mind. 

Structural adjustments

If you have a significant volume of content to migrate to your headless CMS, you’ll need to have a plan for how that content will map to its new environment. For example, in your old CMS, blog author information (bio, role headshot image, etc.) may have been hardcoded into the blog text itself. The new content model, however, may have a separate, structured field for that information. 

That means, you’ll only have to enter the author information into the new CMS once, but you’ll need to trim it from every blog that you’re migrating — which you’ll need to plan for if you’re moving a significant amount of blogs over. 

Data loss

Moving content from one CMS to another carries a risk of data loss — as a consequence of format issues, human error, and so on. To address the risk of data loss, you should back up your data prior to initiating the migration process. Perform a content audit to determine what you need to move, what you can archive, and what you can delete. It might be worth backing up content in multiple formats to anticipate any formatting problems. 

SEO performance

While a headless CMS can improve search engine optimization (SEO), there are plenty of search hazards in migration, including changes to URLs or metadata, the impact of a website redesign, or simple human error during the copying and pasting of content between environments. 

Develop a robust 301 redirect plan to deal with changes to URLs and to preserve content metadata, and make sure you maintain a consistent site hierarchy in the new environment. It may also be possible to leverage SEO analysis tools to zero in on any emerging issues. 

System incompatibility

Some legacy CMSes may apply proprietary formatting to the content, prerendering it into HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. These proprietary formats may not be transferable to a new environment — at least without having that formatting removed. 

It is possible to scrub proprietary formatting from content before it’s introduced to a new CMS, making it machine readable and generic — and available for use in the new CMS. You’ll need to factor this step, and the time and resources it will require, into your content migration plan. 

Resistance to change

Content teams may have been using their legacy CMS for years, and be resistant to changing to the way they work as a result, or blind to any limitations or inefficiencies affecting the current system.

While a headless CMS is user friendly in the sense that it does not demand a high level of technical expertise from users, you can also address resistance to CMS change with appropriate training for team members. As part of that effort, it’s worth emphasizing the content workflow benefits of the new system — including its flexibility. 

Optimizing a content migration in 5 steps

So, how can you give your website content migration plan the best chance of success? Give due consideration to each of the following: 

1. Content audit 

A content audit will help you understand what you’re moving from your legacy CMS to your new CMS, and how you’re going to move it. During the audit, you’ll inventory every piece of content within your digital footprint, which might include mapping your website and creating a list of pages (URLs, images, text, files, etc.). 

The content audit isn’t a box-ticking chore — it’s a critical part of your migration that will ultimately contribute significantly to your identity and voice. Once you’ve identified critical content that needs to be moved, you’ll need to decide whether to remove or refresh out-of-date content.

Your audit team should be made up of both technical and nontechnical stakeholders, so that you can get a developer and editor perspective on how your content will live in the new CMS. It’s about finding balance (and probably compromise) between the content model and software capabilities. 

2. SEO preservation

We touched on the SEO risks earlier, and the importance of developing a 301 redirect plan to handle broken links, and metadata to reinforce keywords and search-bot friendliness. 

It’s worth leveraging available technology to strengthen SEO wherever possible. In the Contentful CMS, for example, marketers can work with structured content, breaking individual pieces of content (blogs, product pages, reviews, etc.) into their component parts (body text, images, headings, etc.) to not only spin-up new content models faster, but make it easier for search engines to crawl and find relevant content.

You should also be seeking to automate technical SEO work as much as possible, especially on a platform like Contentful that provides you with an array of AI-powered tools to fine-tune your content at the click of a button. 

3. Phased migration

Moving your entire content infrastructure to a new CMS, in one go, carries risks. If something goes wrong during your transition, your entire website could fail or face extended downtime. 

With that in mind, it makes more sense to plan your content migration in phases. That means identifying a single content service, and moving that to the new CMS as a first phase, testing it to ensure that it’s working, and then moving on to subsequent phases. You can tailor each phase to suit your business needs, and execute the migration in a way that minimizes downtime and maximizes value.  

4. Content testing

You need to make sure that the CMS you’re migrating to is addressing the limitations of the legacy system that you’re moving away from. To that end, you’ll need to test the new CMS continually, to ensure that your content is performing satisfactorily. 

You can lean into the possibilities of automation (once again) to strengthen your testing strategy. Contentful’s AI-powered testing tool, Contentful Personalization, enables nontechnical users to set up an array of content experiments, helping you boost engagement quickly. 

5. Monitoring 

Following your migration, or following each phase of the migration, you should monitor your content performance against a range of relevant engagement metrics — such as time on page, bounce rate, conversion rate, and so on. The feedback that you gather post-migration is going to be valuable as you continue to make improvements to your CMS, enabling you to make data-driven decisions about content and optimize your content more precisely.  

Remember: A successful migration isn’t the end of your journey. If anything, it’s merely a foundation for what comes next. Use the data you gather post-migration to inform your content strategy going forward, and be ready to integrate new innovations, scale across different channels, and build new content models in the future. 

Go further with Contentful 

Contentful unlocks the possibilities of content migration by ensuring that brands make their voices heard in an evolving digital landscape, and can shape unique, engaging content experiences for their audiences.

Part of an ecosystem of digital content services, Contentful puts an array of AI-powered tools at your fingertips, designed to transform and scale your content workflows — from automated text translation for different global locales, to seamless content publication for an omnichannel environment.

So, whether this is the first step, or the next step, of your content migration, Contentful is ready to help you go further.

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