If you’ve ever moved websites from one content management system to another, you’ve probably thought this or said this:
“I’ll just copy and paste page by page. It’ll be easy.”
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What is content migration?
Content migration is the act of moving content (in this case, HTML pages, media files, documents, and more) from one platform to another.
It’s like moving a house.
It starts with a content audit, which helps you decide what you need to keep and what needs to go. When you move houses, you probably find things in the attic and garage you don’t want to bring to the new place.
Then comes the content matrix, a tool that structures your content into new buckets and navigation. This is akin to labeling your boxes for the new house.
But once you’ve got the keys to the new house, how do you start unpacking the boxes? How do you avoid the chaos and exhaustion?
Why do we migrate content?
Content migration happens throughout the lifecycle of a website. But especially when there is:
- Website redesign. A new design often leads to a change in content layout, which may require how authors and administrators think about content, and edit it to match the new design.
- New website platform. This often comes with a website redesign, too, but even if it doesn’t, moving from one content management system (CMS) to another means new fields, new options, new approaches that require content to be thought about differently.
- New website features. New technology, features, and design options may lead to improvement (for example, the option to create once and publish everywhere) and efficiencies in how content is developed and maintained.
- Ongoing content governance for improvement. Your website is never finished, so if you’re governing your content regularly (and you should be), you’ll find opportunities to improve content, add content for new services or products you offer, enhance the user experience and flow of actions, and more.
Content migration can happen from CMS to CMS, or from an online document to a CMS. No matter how you’re copy-pasting or manually migrating, you’ll want to go in with a plan.
Fortunately, we’ve got some tips.
Plan your people resources
Step one of any project is to plan your resources. But this is crucial if you’re migrating content. Start with a RACI matrix.
A RACI matrix stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.
- Responsible is the person who does the task and gets it to the finish line
- Accountable is someone who oversees or partners along. Like a project manager
- Consulted is someone who may need to weigh in on a content decision, like a designer, and
- Informed is someone who needs to know what’s going on, but largely stays out of it.
In a perfect world, you would include every step of content creation, even post-launch, in a RACI chart, like in this example:
But for purposes of your content migration, start with a simple chart. Who’s who, and what are they doing? Who needs to do the work, sign off on the work, and publish the work?
Consider the size of your pages, too. You can work backwards mathematically in some cases. For example:
- The site is 100 pages
- Each page will take approximately 60 minutes to migrate, give or take
- That’s 100 hours of work
- Divide that among how many people (even if it’s 1 person, that equates to more than 2 weeks of work, if this is all they do)
Of course, this is an estimate and will vary depending on your content's complexity, team size, and number of pages. But it can help you work backwards from a launch date. And ideally, you’ll place your content with enough time before launch to review it in full.
Once the RACI is complete, review regularly:
- Are all the tasks involved in a new piece of content captured?
- Are there any tasks we no longer need or do?
- When do we consider a task truly “done”?
- Are there better ways we can track tasks and progress?
- Should we build more touchpoints?
Expand what your matrix can track
A matrix template is a great place to start, but expanding on its tracking capabilities will keep your migration on track. Beyond the source URLs, new page structure, and recommendations, consider columns for:
- Page owner or migrator
- New URL or staging link
- Status of page, such as In Progress, Ready for Review, Problem/Stuck
- Status of attachments, such as documents, images, or external websites
- Migration notes to identify specific missing information or content that needs follow-up
The matrix becomes more than a sitemap and extends to a project management tool to keep your work transparent and visible, and your team informed and communicative. A spreadsheet program such as Excel or Google Sheets allows your team to share comments, add tags, notes, and more.
Practice with new components
A new website can already feel like a big change, and to cut your team loose to migrate content in a new environment may be intimidating. Time for practice is essential.
As a team, consider a group building exercise. Some workshop ideas to get you started:
- Everyone gets the same page to migrate, with the instruction to use at least one new component
- Everyone gets a different page to migrate, with a chance to explain what they changed and why
- Everyone gets a promotional item to create, with loose instructions on how to do it
Practice in these settings also helps your team align on voice, tone, and readability. Your content’s consistent voice across your website is important to your brand awareness and user experience. Likewise, accessibility measures for good content and readability to ensure all users can access and understand your content.
Not sure where to start learning about readability? PlainLanguage.gov can help, and Hemingway Editor can help fine-tune your skills.
Don’t forget about your documents and files
This topic needs more than a couple of paragraphs, but we’ll say this: As you’re migrating content, think about the files, too. Less is more.
Depending on your industry, though, you may have thousands of files to upload to the new website. Fair enough. But as you’re analyzing your team’s strengths and opportunities, take this moment to talk about your file names and best practices. By and large, your file name should:
- Be intuitive and easy to search on both the front-end and back-end of the website
- Be simple, but clear, and only contain letters, numbers, and underscores if a space is needed
- Be short, aiming for under 25 characters so they’re compatible across modules and search engines
File naming conventions can be easily captured in your organization’s content style guide, and even a post-launch document audit can help you tackle consistency and organization to simplify your team's future.
Leverage automated tools and AI
Depending on who you partner with or work alongside to build your website, you may have automated tools available.
By automigrating documents, for example, your media library can be full in a day or two, which lets your team more easily find and link documents to text and widgets throughout the site as they migrate.
But automigration comes with prep work, too:
- Ensure fields match 1-to-1 from the old content to the new, such as page names and page descriptions
- Most content post-auto-migration may need editing, such as reformatting subheads, bulleted lists, and text layout
- Images and documents may need to be relinked after auto-migration
Artificial intelligence (AI) can also be helpful in content migration. For example, pulling chunks of content from a PDF to move into HTML might lack appropriate paragraph breaks, bulleted lists, or even subhead formatting.
Solution? An AI chatbot (like Claude or ChatGPT) can help you reformat that big block of gray text into more thoughtfully considered content design, with subheadings, shorter paragraphs, and bulleted lists that are easier to read across devices.
Even breaking content into a more usable format does wonders, like this table data from a PDF that wouldn’t format easily by copy-paste:
Drupal founder Dries Buytaert wrote about his efforts to use AI to help generate alt text, an accessibility requirement and best practice for any website.
But the bottom line with any automated tool is to review, edit, and review again. While relying on automatic tools and robots to do the work can be useful, it always requires human review and intervention for accuracy.
Strategize your taxonomy
From the content audit to the sitemap build, you hopefully find ways to organize your content a little deeper with taxonomy.
Taxonomy serves many functions in CMSs, from easy listing pages with user-friendly filters to back-end organization for your authors.
At the start of a big content migration, taxonomy may seem daunting. But from experience, you can shift and model taxonomy as you migrate, and even when you’re done.
Similar to a RACI matrix, think about the categories, topics, and divisions of your organization
- If you sell products, they can be broken down into categories
- If you offer services, they can be broken down into topics
- If you have multiple arms under one name, content can be broken down into divisions
A content strategist helps teams like yours understand these big buckets and their connections to each other.
A taxonomy audit and map at the beginning of migration can help you plan for all these terms, but even as you move through migration, recognize how your taxonomy might change. Put a person or two in charge of taxonomy oversight so that you can shore it up before launch.
Make time to review
One surefire way to put yourself into stress mode before launch is migrating content too close to launch day.
Don’t do that.
Give yourself and your team time to review content thoroughly. View content in context.
- Does the flow of this page make sense?
- Do we have opportunities to call out specific actions we want users to do more meaningfully?
- Are the documents linked and labeled appropriately?
- Is the content consistent in voice, tone, and reading level?
- Does this page link to other meaningful pages on our site or elsewhere?
- Is what we migrated still accurate?
Once you’re “moved in” to the new site, you’ll be better able to see pages holistically, aligned with both your content and the various microcomponents and design elements. That photo you used on your previous site might not look so great in a larger size on the new site. Or maybe that paragraph from the old site looks much longer and more daunting to read on mobile with the larger font size and increased white space.
Whatever is going on in your “new” house, the old furniture might not fit. So it’s OK to rearrange a little, step back and review it altogether, and look for places you can still tweak and improve.
Tough truths about migrations
Despite all the plans you made, the content reviews you completed, and the solid migration you presented, you might move into the new house and find that some things just don’t work.
Why does this happen?
Your design changed, so your content has to change, too
Many web projects aren’t just about re-sorting your content and navigation, but also your design. As new designs enter the conversation, how content is displayed may change. That means your content needs a different type of review.
New content components—from content types like basic pages and landing pages, to components like promotional boxes, accordions, and callouts—help design and display your content in a way that works across devices for all users.
But just copying and pasting from an old site to a new one means you need to consider how these new elements could make your content better, which takes some discussion and strategy.
Your SEO may be impacted
While your audit will help you find pages you can eliminate, you need to plan for how those pages are redirected. That’s one of many tips when considering how your search engine optimization (SEO) may be impacted.
There are pros and cons. According to SEM Rush, moving to a new design likely means moving to a mobile-responsive and more accessible web experience, which is excellent for SEO! And, if the design was done with accessibility as a priority, page speed should be reduced, which also helps.
- Broken links and page paths. Even if your navigation improved, your URL structures changed, too. Plan for redirects as you migrate to avoid losing important page paths.
- New page indexing. New pages mean they’re new to search engines, and may not be indexed on launch day. So don’t expect a big bump in traffic on new pages immediately.
- Missing content. Content you ranked for previously that isn’t relevant in your new site might still be indexed by search engines, but once removed, it could lead to 404 pages. Set up those redirects!
You’ll find more content that you could do without
During your audit, you decided a piece of content should stick around in the new site. But once you’re on the new site, it doesn’t really make as much sense as you thought.
Maybe it’s popular but outdated content. Maybe the voice and tone aren’t in line with freshly rewritten content. Or maybe it’s too text-heavy for a much more white-space-friendly design.
It’s OK that the audit might need some more shifts as migration begins. But make that decision early so you don’t keep something you don’t really want.
Your content still needs TLC
How long has it been since you revisited your content’s voice, tone, and style guide? Is the content written consistently at an accessible grade level throughout your site? Was one section written by a previous writer using their own style?
Or maybe if it’s outdated, it’s just missing some new information. Your content needs to be reviewed on a regular basis for accuracy, brevity, and value to your mission and audience.
It won’t be perfect on launch day
What content you have, especially core pages where most of your users visit, might still need some love.
How long has it been since you revisited your content’s voice, tone, and style guide? If you couldn’t line up consistently before launch, the post-launch world and small-step content improvements are the way to go.
Maybe you had some third-party tools you wanted to build and integrate into your site, and now that the migration is done, there’s room to devote that time.
Once you’re past launch day:
- Keep a running list of opportunities for further improvement and prioritize those throughout the year.
- Make space for user research to determine how the new site is (or isn’t) meeting users' needs.
- Find out where you can transfer more of your documents to HTML pages for easier access, or
- Seek out ways you can automate processes online rather than over the phone
A rule of thumb? Your website is never done, even on launch day. As a growing and evolving part of your outreach to real people, you’ll always be improving and updating as your brand needs.
Take care of your new website like you take care of your home: Clean it regularly, free it from clutter, and improve it so you can stay comfortable there for a long time.