Stressing over content migration? I’ve been there. I’ve helped move a client’s website to a new host, and I’ve had my own websites transferred to new hosts and CMSs. And let me tell ya: It was nerve-racking every time. But if I’d had a website content migration plan, it would’ve been easier.
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To give you the most thorough advice, I spoke with a HubSpot replatforming specialist whose job it is to migrate websites for HubSpot customers. I also spoke with the CSO of a web development agency that does content migration regularly. You don’t want to miss these tips!
Table of Contents
- What is website content migration?
- Website Content Migration Plan: 7 Steps
- Website Content Migration Checklist
- Ready to Make Your Website Content Migration Plan?
What is website content migration?
Website content migration means moving your website’s content (text, images, and other files) over to a new host, content management system (CMS), domain, or website design. It commonly happens after a decision to rebrand a business or redesign a website.
Content migration is a subset of the broader website migration, which will include the technical aspects of moving a website, such as updating your DNS settings and setting up redirects. For more information about website migration as a whole, read our post on migrating your website without harming SEO.
Website Content Migration Plan: 7 Steps
Step 1: Assemble your content migration team.
I asked Kyle Brigham, chief strategy officer of Marcel Digital, to describe his web development agency’s content migration process. The first thing I noticed was how well-defined his teams are. From content management to design to SEO, his agency makes sure to know who’s in charge of what.
“Typically, they don‘t have the resources in-house to migrate the content themselves,” he says of the clients who order Marcel’s migration service. “So they’re relying on us as their partner to ensure that all the content on their website gets migrated over.”
If you’re handling this process in-house, be prepared to create your own content migration team. Website content migration can be very time consuming and resource intensive, so you want to assign leads for each aspect.
When you assemble your content migration team, decide who will be in charge of:
- Overseeing the overall content migration process end-to-end
- Text content
- Image and video content
- SEO
- Website performance
You’ll need someone who can:
- Review the content and make edits (if needed) before migrating
- Upload and organize the content files into online storage
- Load the content into the new site
- QA the content after it's loaded into the new site
If you’re working with an agency, it probably won’t offer content editing or creation services for free. It will rely on you to provide the content, or it’ll charge extra to create content for you.
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- SEO
- Security
- Mobile Performance
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Pro tip: If you’re changing CMSs, such as moving from WordPress to Squarespace, you often cannot keep the same design because that website theme you’re using is proprietary to that specific CMS. So be prepared for your design to change — which might affect your content.
For example, if your current design doesn’t have a featured image on blog posts but your new design does, you now need an image to place on each of those blog posts on the new website.
Step 2: Create backups of your entire website.
Backing up your site regularly is good practice, and that’s especially true anytime you’re about to make a major change to your website. This gives you peace of mind because if something goes wrong and “breaks” your website, you can restore the backup and get back to square one.
Your IT team or web hosting company can help you back up your site. If you’re on WordPress, you can also back up your website using a plugin. Personally, I use UpdraftPlus to do daily backups of my WordPress blogs, and I store those files in a Drive folder.
Step 3: Audit your existing website.
Your website audit happens in two phases:
1. Content
Create a content inventory that includes every page’s URL.
“We have a content management team internally that takes an inventory of all the content on the website,” says Brigham. “And that is inclusive of everything that a user might see, but also any files, like PDFs, that may not be showing up in a crawl, but that we still need to account for.”
A quick and easy way to get a list of your site’s URLs is by adding “/sitemap.xml” after your domain. For example, you can find HubSpot’s sitemap at https://www.hubspot.com/sitemap.xml.
If that doesn’t work, try a free sitemap generator tool like XML Sitemaps. Just enter your domain, and it’ll crawl the entire site and generate a sitemap.
To turn that into a spreadsheet, scroll down and click “Download all sitemaps in a zip file.”
Unzip the file. Then open the file titled “urllist.txt”
Copy-paste that text into Google Sheets or Excel.
Pro tip: The content audit is a great opportunity to clean house. Get rid of any test pages and outdated or duplicate content that you don’t want moved over to the new site.
For each URL in your content inventory spreadsheet, consider having a column for each of the following:
- Owner: This is the person who is in charge of reviewing the content to see if it should be migrated, and if yes, ensuring that it is correctly migrated to the new website.
- SEO metadata: In addition to moving content over, Brigham advises thinking about metadata fields (things like the page’s title, meta description, and image alt text). These help ensure the pages rank well.
- QA status: This column tracks if the URL has been reviewed after migration.
2. Technical/SEO
Website content migration can majorly affect your website’s SEO and search rankings. So, before you migrate, get a snapshot of your Google Analytics or other ranking data so you can compare the before and after.
Note your top-performing pages in terms of organic traffic. You want to protect these pages, which means taking a baseline of their performance before the migration so that you can ensure they don’t tank in the SERPs afterward.
Pro tip: Use a free tool like Website Grader to assess your current site’s performance and diagnose any issues you need to fix.
Free SEO Audit Kit: Download this free toolkit to get a checklist, spreadsheet, and guide for running an SEO audit.
Step 4: Decide on your new sitemap and information architecture.
Now that you’ve diagnosed any performance issues, run an SEO audit, and taken inventory of your content, it’s time to think about your new website’s information architecture. This touches on topics such as:
- What will the website menus and navigation look like?
- What categories of content make the most sense for our website?
- How will we structure URLs to optimize for SEO?
You’ll also create a new sitemap to submit after the migration (more on that later).
Pro tip: Avoid changing URLs and content before the migration, if you can help it. If you’re changing your domain name (e.g., from mywebsite.com to newwebsite.com), changing URLs is unavoidable. But other than that, try to keep your URLs and content the same.
“Because we're both a web development and an SEO agency, we typically recommend for folks to leave their content the same when migrating to a new website,” says Brigham, “primarily because of the implications of reindexing the website when that new site goes live.”
If you do change URLs, you’ll have to set up redirects, which can be a technical and complex process best left to the professionals. This will also affect your search rankings, as Google has to recrawl and reindex your new URLs.
How long would that take? According to Google, “As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move in our index; larger sites can take longer.”
To speed up the process, submit a sitemap once your content migration is complete.
Free Website Optimization Checklist
This website optimization checklist will help you perfect your website's:
- Performance
- SEO
- Security
- Mobile Performance
Download Free
All fields are required.
Step 5: Migrate your content to the new website.
The moment you’ve been waiting for: actually migrating the content! There are two ways to do this: manual and automated.
Believe it or not, much of content migration is manual. You must copy text from the old website and paste it to the new website as well as upload images to ensure everything makes it over to the new website in the correct places.
For simple websites (like a five-page portfolio site), manual is your best bet. This is how I migrated the content for my portfolio website when I moved it from WordPress to Squarespace.
For larger websites, as you can imagine, manual takes a lot of time and effort.
Pro tip: If you are merely changing hosting providers, your website content migration should be relatively simple. Contact your new host, and they should be able to help you (usually for free).
For example, A2 Hosting offers free website migrations.
The fact that content migration is largely manual was shocking to me. But that’s because every website content migration I’ve been a part of was merely changing hosts (a relatively simple process, as my website design stayed the same).
You can automate content migration, but surprisingly, it’s not easy.
“Automated is a lot tougher,” says Brigham. “But it can be used for repeatable sections of the website, such as a blog or a resources section, where we can effectively map the old content to the new content on the new website.”
“So, hypothetically, if you had 2,000 blog posts, we wouldn't want to hand load 2,000 blog posts. We probably would be able to find an automated solution for that.”
Additionally, for content migrations where the design and CMS stay the same, you might be able to use a plugin, like this one for customers of web hosting company SiteGround:
But when you’re changing platforms (such as WordPress to Squarespace), it’s more complicated.
“Usually, there's no easy button,” says Brigham. “If you’re moving from WordPress to WordPress, you can utilize some of those plugins, but oftentimes, it's not a one-to-one relationship where you can just hit a button and walk away.”
“There usually has to be some kind of QA that's manual to ensure that everything looks good. Because you may map content, and the words might all move over, but the layout may have changed, and therefore, the layout ends up looking terrible on the new website.”
I’ve had this happen to me. I moved my client’s website from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress, and it was a mess because the website’s design changed. I ended up having to go in and manually fix how the content appeared in the new layout.
Whether you’re migrating content using a manual or automated process, it’s still a lot of work. That’s why Content Hub (HubSpot’s CMS) offers website content migrations that are handled by our team of professionals.
If you order the website migration service, “There's just two to four weeks of quiet where we are just working on it, and you’re not part of it,” says Maia, a HubSpot Senior Replatforming Specialist who has done over 200 website migrations. “If you're doing it yourself, that is, like, the bulk of the work.”
Alright, so here’s every website owner’s burning question: “During website content migration, will my site be down?” If it’s done correctly, the answer is no.
Ideally, at this point, your new website is in a staging environment so you can check everything before pushing it live. During this content migration process, your old site remains live and viewable to the public, while your new site is “hidden” on a staging domain.
“Your site stays as it is. We're building it on this different, separate domain that is only for this process,” Maia explains. “And then when you connect the domain, that old domain goes away. It’s replaced with the live domain.”
Step 6: QA the migrated content on the new website.
Take a deep breath. Now, it’s time to check that all the content has been properly moved to the new website.
This is the time to whip out the content inventory spreadsheet you created earlier. Ensure each URL is accounted for and QA’d, and track who has signed off on each URL after the migration.
Check your new website (which is in the staging environment) against your old website (which is live) before you launch your new website. Make any corrections as needed.
Step 7: Launch the new website, monitor performance, and submit a new sitemap.
When it’s ready, push your staging site to production. Depending on your CMS, this can be as simple as clicking “Publish.” Here’s what it looks like within Content Hub:
However, launching might involve more technical tasks, such as updating your DNS records if you're changing your domain.
At this point, the work isn’t really over (sorry). You’ll want to submit a new sitemap to Google so that it can recrawl and reindex your pages quickly so your SEO doesn’t take a huge hit.
Even after that, routinely monitor your organic search traffic to ensure your SEO hasn’t suffered because of the website content migration. If it was done right, you have no need to worry. But it’s best to keep track, just in case.
Website Content Migration Checklist
Because website content migration has so many parts, here’s a handy, high-level checklist of the things you’ll need to think about.
Ready to Make Your Website Content Migration Plan?
As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts when you’re moving websites. With the right team and a website content migration plan, however, it should go smoothly.
Free Website Optimization Checklist
This website optimization checklist will help you perfect your website's:
- Performance
- SEO
- Security
- Mobile Performance
Download Free
All fields are required.
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