A quick guide to content migration

When you move house, you generally take your things with you. Whilst your old sofa may make a beeline for the skip and the opportunity might prompt a bit of a clear out – were you ever going to get round to brewing your own beer? – most is boxed up and arrives at your new abode in a 7.5 tonne truck. This is a great metaphor for the content migration part of your new website project. Whilst you might have new service or product pages, chances are that there will be a considerable number of old news items, existing pages, factsheets, white papers etc. that need to go in a virtual box to their new home. So, call in the movers? Or is it more complicated than that?

New design or new platform?

If your website involves sticking with the same content management system (CMS) but either changing up a minor version or having a new theme built, then the content migration is likely to be fairly straightforward. The CMS platforms we use – WordPress and Drupal – allow content to be exported as an XML file which can then be imported into the new website.

There will always be some manual intervention for one or more of the following reasons:

• Images may need to be resized to suit the new CMS theme
• Cross-relating news items to products or taxonomy (subject list) may need to be done individually
• Content may need to be assigned to different CMS users/authors

When we built our new Marketecture website at the end of 2013, we stuck with WordPress as the platform and managed to easily migrate the following:

• All posts
• All CMS users

We were able to maintain the post authorship assignment for the users and whilst we changed most of the page content and featured images on the posts, the bulk of the heavy content lifting was done in less than ten minutes.

Bespoke CMS you say? Oh dear…

So if migrating content from one CMS build to a new installation with the same CMS but a different theme is straightforward, where do the tricky projects originate?

Bespoke CMS

If you are currently using a bespoke CMS your previous website agency built specifically for your website, it’s highly likely there won’t be export functionality. Depending on the size of your website, the action will need to be a prolonged bout of copying and pasting or developing automated scripts to ‘scrape’ the website content, assuming the pages have been built with well-structured HTML. In this situation, it pays to be pragmatic:

• How successful will the automated script approach be?
• If this approach will migrate content with less than 60% accuracy, requiring a lot of post-import checking and amendment, would it be more pragmatic to take a manual approach?

One important factor to consider is the amount of time developing the import script will take, especially if you expect only an average accuracy rate. Whilst developers tend to prefer the automated route, if it will take a week to develop the scripts, would a manual approach save time overall? If you do go down the manual route, if the amount of content to be migrated is considerable, one option we’ve considered in the past is outsourcing the work to the Far East.

Old CMS

CMS platforms are continually updated to improve security, add new features and continue to support the needs of their users. We encourage our clients to use our CMS Maintenance Retainer where we keep on top of updates each month but if you’ve not had this type of service, you may find your CMS is very outdated. An export may package your posts and pages in a nice XML bundle, but if there are compatibility issues when importing, this may necessitate more attention after migration.

No CMS

If your current website doesn’t have a database attached, excluding the small number of ‘no database’ platforms, then it’s likely you don’t have a content management system. In this case, migration will require the development of a migration script or lots of time with CTRL+C and CTRL+V.

As above, be pragmatic and balance the three factors:

• Quantity of content
• The likely success of an automated approach
• The time to automate

No vases broken in transit

The good news is if your agency is as helpful as Marketecture, all the content migration will be done for you. We include content migration in the scope of website development projects as part of our quality assurance stage – some manual migration provides an ideal opportunity to check the CMS is working as it should – and to ease our clients’ workloads.

Just as there are some removal firms that will itemise and unpack for you, a good agency will make sure you can metaphorically move in, grab a coffee and write a blog sitting on your new sofa in your new home.