6 Best Practices For Content Migrations

Content migration can be a pretty difficult process, with a lot of responsibility placed on the shoulders of website managers. You run the risk of disruptions caused by downtime, data loss, and high costs – all of which threaten to bring content migration to an end, putting the entire website at risk.

It’s, therefore, crucial that you know how to successfully implement content migration when you’re managing your organization’s website. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore some of the most important best practices for content migration. Keep on reading to find out more.

What is a Content Migration? 

Think for a second about all of the content on your website. Whether you’re running an online jewelry store or a unified messaging platform, you probably manage hundreds of pages of content. There will also be many different types of content that you look after, such as blog posts or metadata structures.

Content migration is the process of moving all of this content, in all of its different forms, from one location to another. This can take place for a variety of reasons. One of the most common causes of content migration is moving from one website to another. As well as this, you might need to undergo content migration if you are switching between content management systems.

Because there are many different forms that content can take and lots of reasons why you need to undergo content migration, it’s worth breaking it down into separate varieties.

Types of Content Migrations

Replicating Content

When your content is already performing to the standards that you expect it to, there’s no need to rip it all up and start again when you’re performing a content migration. Instead, all that you’ll need to do is accurately replicate the content.

This will mean that you have to carefully log and reconstruct as much of the existing site structure as possible. Failing to do this could risk losing all of your progress in terms of SEO, traffic, and web content management once the migration is complete.

Redeploying Content

While simply replicating content might be the dream when it comes to content migration, it’s unlikely that you’re totally happy when moving content from one system to another. This means that other options, such as redeploying content, are more widely used.

Redeploying content will move existing content around when you’re undergoing a content migration. Let’s say that you have an AI tool that is not getting as much traffic as you might want it to. You could redeploy this content into a different section of the website, such as your resources section, which might drive more traffic to the content.

Restructuring Content

When you need to undergo a significant change to your overall customer journey, restructuring the content may be necessary. Think of this as a more complex and comprehensive version of redeploying content.

Rather than just transplanting a few pages of content, restructuring the content will move around large swathes of your website. As well as this, it might break up existing content and ensure that it is better placed to perform strongly. 

For example, you may look at a few customer review examples on other websites and find inspiration for ways to make these more prominent on your homepage.

Rewriting Content

When you’re moving content from one place to another, you’ll probably find that some of it needs to be rewritten or recoded in order for it to be as engaging as possible, as well as technically secure.

As you probably expect, rewriting lots of content can be a difficult and time-consuming job. This means that most website managers use it alongside restructuring or redeploying content, as this will help to save time and cut staff workload.

Removing Content

Finally, you may find that there is a lot of obsolete or out-of-date content that is still displayed on your website. Moving between websites or content management systems could be a great opportunity to remove this obsolete content, such as outdated technical writing, and make sure that your users experience only the most relevant and up-to-date content.

Importance of Successful Content Migration

Now that you understand a bit more about the meaning of content migration and some of its different varieties, you might be wondering why achieving effective and successful content migration is so important. 

Effective content migration offers numerous benefits:

• Maintain Valuable Content: Ensure that your hard work on blog posts, customer reviews, and images isn't lost during the transition.
• Boost Customer Experience: A smooth migration prevents issues like broken links, enhancing the user experience and customer loyalty.
• Reduce Downtime: Minimize website offline time with a well-planned migration strategy.
• Stay On Top of Data Security: Protect sensitive data by following stringent security policies during migration.

Maintain Your Valuable Content

Probably the biggest reason why content migration is important is that it allows you to carry over your valuable content to a new context when you undergo a shift in your overall website structure. This means that all of your hard work – including creating lots of blog posts, customer reviews, and images – isn’t wasted. 

Today, content that’s well presented and impactful can go a long way in encouraging conversions and driving sales. So maintaining valuable content is a no-brainer sales strategy for small business owners.

Boost Customer Experience

Let’s say that your business adopts a new website. However, you fail to complete an effective content migration plan, leading to broken links or missing images. There is nothing more frustrating for customers than clicking on a link only to be hit with a 404 message rather than a product page. This will have a clear impact on your business and revenue. 

Instead, with a solid content migration strategy, your customers will enjoy a smooth and pleasant user experience, boosting customer loyalty and maximizing the chances of them making a purchase with your business.

Reduce Downtime

Ensuring you keep all your systems up and running at all times is paramount. A well-planned content migration as part of your content strategy can help you reduce the amount of downtime that you experience when moving between different systems. When you plan the migration process, you can be confident that you’ve minimized the amount of time that your website will be offline.

Stay On Top of Data Security

While you may be worried about things such as generative AI risks, there’s no doubt that the biggest concern of the current digital world is cybersecurity

With content migration often also including data migration, it’s therefore crucial that you have a clear and effective strategy. This should include well-defined policies about safeguarding potentially sensitive data when you’re using content migration tools, helping you to stay on top of data security and privacy on your website.

Best Practices for Successful Content Migration

Planning Phase

Begin With a Content Inventory

You wouldn’t start moving house without clearly making sure that you know everything that you need to take with you – and a content migration project is the same. You need to begin by creating a clear and in-depth content inventory, logging all of the current content in your web design, that you can monitor throughout the migration process.

This should be a long-term task and it should ideally take place before you’ve even decided to go ahead with content migration. It should give you a clear image of all of your content, allowing you to plan the time that content migration would take, as well as the amount of rewriting or restructuring of the content that you’d need to complete.

Create a Content Migration Checklist

Once you know what you need to migrate with a content inventory, it’s time to formulate a more detailed plan about what this would look like. This will take the form of a content migration checklist.

The checklist should include all of the steps that you’ll need to go through – use these best practices to create these steps for your organization. It should also include success criteria and KPIs linked to your business goals, so that you can evaluate the process at the end of the post-migration period.

You could then talk through this checklist with all of the key stakeholders in your website – not only the website management team but also the strategic leadership team of your business. This will help everyone in your organization understand the purpose and importance of the content migration process.

Set Clear Goals and Objectives

As with anything, there’s no point migrating content without understanding what you aim to get out of it. For the last part of your planning phase, define what your organization hopes to achieve with the migration and set measurable objectives.

Is your goal to consolidate content into one CMS platform? Are you aiming to improve content organization and website design to deliver a better user experience? Do you want to improve your SEO?

Whatever your goal is, make sure it’s clearly defined and the whole team understands what you’re working towards. Set relevant KPIs and implement ways to track them, taking note of what those KPIs are before you begin. 

Preparation Phase

Content Strategy Development

Now it’s time to flesh out your content strategy. This is where you determine what pages you will need and where content will be hosted on those pages.

Consider this the architectural stage – and indeed, a content architect can help you develop your strategy if needed. The aim is to structure content in a logical way to reflect content hierarchy and make it easy to find.

Separate the inventory list from earlier into content types and topics. These might include:

• News articles
• Blogs
• Knowledge base resources
• Customer reviews
• Case studies
• eBooks or white papers
• Non-text assets such as videos or podcasts

Look at where there are gaps as this presents opportunities to create new content.

Besides determining how you will use each content piece on your website, it’s also worth considering ways you could reuse this content on other channels, such as social media or in webinars.

SEO Considerations

Whether or not your objective is to improve SEO, it’s still worth following SEO best practices during migration. Content migration can negatively affect your site’s SEO as you’re likely making multiple changes to the site structure and URLs. So it’s important to be aware of any challenges and make improvements to content to avoid losing search engine rankings and organic traffic.

There are several elements to consider here: the content itself, URLs, links, and technical SEO.

Run an SEO audit to see how well existing content performs, test page load speed, and assess mobile responsiveness. This will help you decide what optimizations you can make. 

A good place to start is with keyword research. By compiling a list of relevant keywords and phrases, you can optimize text-based content so audiences can easily find it.

Optimize metadata too, including page titles, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. These will be crawled by Google so should also include relevant keywords.

At this stage, it’s also worth creating a backlink inventory. If you have any high-value backlinks that point to your old URLs, you’ll need to reach out to referring domains to update those links once migration is complete. 

Finally, create a comprehensive list of old URLs and their corresponding new ones. Set up 301 redirects where needed, ensuring it points directly to the final destination rather than creating multiple redirects in a chain.

If you are duplicating content, you’ll need to ensure the source content has a canonical link in the head tag. This ensures only one version of the page is accessible to search engines.

Data Backup

If anything goes awry during migration, it could have a huge impact on the business. Backing up data helps to prevent data loss and corruption, protect against human errors during migration, minimize downtime, safeguard your site against security threats, and generally give you peace of mind. It also means if anything does go wrong, you can more easily recover from any issues.

So before you go begin the migration, back up relevant data so it’s as up-to-date as possible. Identify what data you need to back up, including user data and media files. Then, choose your backup method. 

If you have a small website, a manual backup is often suitable. But for larger websites, it’s more practical to do this using automated backup tools. Many CMS platforms offer plugins like UpdraftPlus and Jetpack, which run real-time, automated backups. You could also use cloud-based services like Acronis or Backblaze to host your data securely off-site.

After running a backup, make sure to verify that all data is present and complete.

Ensure the Tech Stack is Prepared

Content migration is a pretty complex operation, requiring a range of different moving parts and an up-to-date tech stack. This means that you should choose the right CMS to use, allowing you to manage content as it moves between sites. Define the solutions that you don’t currently have in your tech stack in order to prepare.

If your website is built using PHP frameworks, ensure that they are compatible with your new system and are updated to the latest versions to avoid any migration issues.

You should also look for dedicated content migration tools. These can help to automate many elements of the process, such as managing file share cleanup to remove obsolete content. This will enable you to upgrade your tech stack without having to invest in lots of different and expensive digital tools.

Migration Phase

Execute the Content Migration

With all of the preparation complete, it is time for you to implement the content migration. Many of the technical details will be handled by your tech stack – or your IT support staff – so most of your job as website manager will be focused on monitoring the migration and responding to any issues that arise.

However, you should be careful to use a test migration in the first part of the execution stage. This will allow you to identify and rectify any problems in a safe environment that has minimal impact on your website’s functionality.

Post-Migration Phase

Quality Assurance

A successful content migration process shouldn’t come to an end once you’ve converted all of your digital assets to the new system or site. Instead, you should pay close attention to the post-migration period by conducting quality assurance testing. 

It is easy to lose some of the initial structured content during the migration, so you should manually test the website. Look out for any visual elements that stick out, including images that aren’t loading fully or videos that aren’t integrated into web pages. 

SEO and Performance Check

While Quality Assurance focuses on visual aspects of your content, it’s also important to consider the technical aspects.

Has the migration impacted your website traffic or search engine rankings? Look at the KPIs you set earlier and measure relevant metrics to see what has changed. Keep in mind that some fluctuations are normal so this process should be ongoing.

Check that all links direct to the correct pages – that includes backlinks from other domains. Ensure any changes to metadata have been reflected, too. 

Finally, check that migrated content isn’t slowing down your load times or mobile responsiveness. These can significantly impact your SEO and user experience so it’s crucial that you fix any issues immediately.

Evaluate and Reflect

Once the technical aspects of the content migration process are completed, take time to evaluate the success of the process and reflect on how you could improve it in future. This is where your checklist comes in useful – use the success criteria that you set in that checklist to measure the efficacy of the content migration.

Let’s say that one of your goals was to restructure content on a blog post examining the best digital business card. You should compare the traffic on the post-migration page with the pre-migration traffic, as well as calculate the impact on revenue and turnover. This will allow you to evaluate and quantify the success of your content migration strategy.

Stakeholder Review

While running through your checklist and measuring KPIs can give you answers, it’s also crucial to get feedback from stakeholders to ensure the migration’s success and address concerns as soon as possible. 

This should include both internal and external stakeholders, such as: 

• Specialists, including content creators, content architects, or SEO agencies
• DevOps team members
• Business leaders

Free to use image sourced from Unsplash

During the review, ask stakeholders to evaluate your site as if they were a visitor. Does the content structure and flow make sense? Does each page and piece of content function as it should? Is the user experience consistent across devices?

You could even ask them to check for specific issues such as broken links, missing content, and SEO discrepancies. Address any issues immediately, then review their feedback to ensure your migration aligns with business objectives established earlier on.

Training and Documentation Phase

User Training

After migration, users may need additional support and training to adapt to the new system. A user in this instance refers to anyone who uses the system, including in-house staff and content managers. 

User training ensures everyone can efficiently and effectively manage the new site—that includes updating existing content, adding new content in line with your SEO strategy, and organizing visual assets as needed. 

If you’ve switched to a new CMS, your training should help users become familiarized with any new features and tools so they can use them to their full potential. Proper training will also prevent common issues such as incorrect formatting and broken links that could undo all of your hard work during the migration.

Documentation

Besides training users immediately after migration, it’s also worth creating detailed documents for future reference. This ensures users always have access to best practices and can troubleshoot when needed. But it also means new users can be onboarded quickly and easily.

Your documentation is like a style guide—it should clearly outline how to upload new content to the site, including image sizes, meta tags, and keywords. In addition, it should include common user errors and how to fix them and contact information for a team member who can support users with more technical concerns.

Monitoring and Maintenance 

Ensuring the success of content migration is a long-term project. Even after completion, evaluations, and training, you must keep monitoring the system and users to ensure success.

Track relevant KPIs that you established at the beginning of the migration. Have they improved since you first measured these post-migration? If not and your search engine rankings are still low, you need to determine the root cause.

Look at support requests, too. Are users experiencing common issues and requesting similar support from your team? If so, look for ways to simplify their workflow or provide additional training. Don’t forget to update documentation as needed.

Content Migration: A Crucial Task for Website Managers

In this comprehensive guide to content migration, we’ve explained the different forms of content migration and why these are so important for businesses, regardless of your specific goals.

We’ve also examined the six best practices for web managers looking to stay on top of their content lifecycle with a migration plan, including tips such as finding the right tech stack that incorporates effective migration tools.

So, what are you waiting for? Start your content migration today!