At least once during your website’s lifetime the need for a website migration rises: when you migrate to a new Content Management System. It is the occasion to look back on your website, and clean it up to make it a better version of itself.
The migration of a website is a challenge and requires rigorous preparation to run smoothly.
The first step of a website migration, before starting to actually move content, is to get an accurate view of the current structure of the website, to determine whether the content outgrew it and if it should be adapted to allow your website to grow further. It is the occasion to reflect on the user centricity of your website, and whether the current structure of your website still fits your needs.
Check the most visited pages of your website. Do they fit well in the current structure of the website? Read here on how we can help you analyze the traffic of your website in relation to its structure.
List the various content types that constitute your website. You may feel limited by the capabilities of your current website, so take the time to think about your website’s content architecture with the new CMS functionalities in mind.
In addition to the obvious pages of your website, do not forget all the additional building blocks that constitute your website: media (images, videos, downloadable documents), menu items, categories/tags (e.g. article categories), user profiles, etc.
Typically, the pages with the highest impact will be completely redesigned and rephrased. However, it is often unrealistic to manually rework all pages of your website.
We still advise you to migrate all your current content, to preserve your SEO reputation and guide the transition into the new structure. Old pages of your website could be referenced by other sources, and breaking those links would damage your SEO reputation. Depending on the size of your website, this can lead to an impossible amount of work.
Thus, one crucial part of a successful relaunch is the migration of its content.
Content migration
There are two major workflows to perform content migration from your old website to the new one.
For the bigger projects with hundreds of pages of a similar structure or generally a large number of pages, we advise for a code-based migration. We write code transferring the database from the old website to the new website. This can require a lot of development work especially if the website is complex, or has variable content structure. With this workflow, you have a personalized migration, but also depend heavily on developers. In addition, such migration still requires review and potentially post editing, and careful manual work on the most important pages.
Work autonomously and do not rely on developers.
Smaller websites tend to be migrated manually, copy-pasting content from the old website to the new one. The advantage of this method is that you have full access to the new content and full control over the content and looks of the new pages. However, this is usually quite time consuming on your end. The migration of images and other media, in particular, can be notably tedious, if you need to download, upload, and place in content each one separately.
With these projects in mind, we developed a new way to migrate content from your old website to the new one.
Gain up to 15 minutes per imported page with our importer tool.
With our new migration tool, you paste urls to pages from your old website, and they are automatically imported into your new website. All the media entities are imported, as well as all the translated versions of your pages.
You then have access to the content and can perform any necessary adjustment autonomously.
Included by default in our distribution.
You can start content migration as soon as the new environment is created; without waiting for development work.
You gain up to 15 minutes per page compared to a fully manual import, which over all your website can amount to days of work, and this feature is included by default in our distribution.
If the main obstacle to updating your old website to a newer, more secure CMS version is the migration of your content, feel free to contact us for a demonstration of our tool!