Challenges for CMS migrations
Migrating an existing site to a CMS creates an entirely new set of challenges and may be considered one of the hardest web development projects you’ll ever tackle.
The larger the site, the more complexity and harder the transition will be.
- Different rule sets
- Different site structure
- Differences in systems
- Differences in underlying source code
Issues to Consider
- Larger organizations or complex sites require dedicated IT staff or outside vendors to handle migration
- Some vendors specialize in CMS migrations
- Some CMS platform vendors can offer assistance with migration
- Don’t expect everything to go smoothly – even with vendor support
- Expect to lose some data or content
- Migrations will take longer than anticipated
- You’ll likely have some transition issues that appear after migration
- SEO and search issues
- Don’t fall for marketing hype
Steps for migrating content
It’s difficult to cover all the steps required for a proper CMS migration in this setting because every site, site content, and CMS are different, and they have different technical challenges that are unique to that specific migration.
Best practice is establish realistic goals for your migration from the beginning.
Define the Migration
What type of migration are you performing?
- Are you moving content?
- Does page structure need to migrate?
- Should all of the metadata be replaced?
- Will automation processes handle all of the tasks?
Site Inventory
You’ll need to perform a site inventory to discover all assets, content, functionality, and paid structures that should be maintained, should be quantified, including internal links content relationships and navigation.
- Assets
- Content
- Functionality
- Structure
- Links and relationships
Discover and identify and orphaned or stale content that can be discarded will make the migration smoother.
If you have content rules to use as guide, you can reduce a significant amount of time.
Set Migration Rules
Defining rules for breaking up content and how they should be mapped to the new system will reduce bottle necks and speed up the transition. Try to anticipate as many decisions in this process as you can, so the migration team members are making consistent choices throughout the entire process.
- Set rules to guide if, when, and how content should be broken up
- Create rules to guide content mapping to the new system
- Anticipate all scenarios to maintain consistency with all team mebers
Migration Failures
What happens if target requirements are not met? For example, if an article doesn’t have an author associated with it or publishing date, what happens? If you’re automating the process, you could auto-generate generic values or tag the content for a later manual transfer where values could be inserted by hand.
Manual transfer processes need to make sure that policies are in place to deal with these so that they’re handled consistently. After initial transfers, compare the results against your expectations – if you’re not where you need to be, consider modifying your transfer policies.
Migration Concerns
1 – Fight scope creep
Make sure you clearly defined your goals and what results are acceptable to you and then stick with them.
2 – Don’t change target requirements
Don’t change the target requirements of the new CMS to match your older source content. You might think will make the migration easier, but doing so goes against the reason for switching to a new system in the first place.
3 – Test automated processes
Automation might help to make the migration faster and easier, but be sure to test on small batches of data first and compare the results to what you’ve define as a successful transfer BEFORE you run the entire job.
4- Check with the development community
Chances are, if you’re migrating from one CMS to another, someone else has already gone through the process. Check online sources to find articles offering advice, tools, or even scripts you can use to assist your migration, especially for open-source systems.