When to consider migration
Before embarking on your migration journey, ask yourself these key questions:
- Is your current CMS lagging? - Frequent errors, crashes, or difficulty implementing modern features
- Is your system struggling to handle growth? - Slowdowns as you add content, storage limits, bottlenecks in workflows
- Slow load times affecting user experience? - Pages taking more than a few seconds to load
- Is your data lacking safety? - Security breaches, missing basic security features, unpatched vulnerabilities
- You need more adaptability - Difficulty publishing across channels, can’t create/manage APIs, limited custom content types
The three phases of migration
Every successful content migration follows three essential phases:
Phase 1: planning
Your objective is to properly plan what needs to be migrated, how the migration will be performed, and how success will be verified.
Key planning activities:
- Define migration goals - What do you want to achieve with the new CMS?
- Audit existing content - Create a complete inventory of pages, posts, media, and metadata
- Map content to ButterCMS - Identify how content will fit into Pages, Collections, and Blog Posts
- Identify dependencies - Links, references, categories, tags, authors
- Plan for SEO preservation - URL structure, redirects, meta tags
- Set acceptance criteria - How will you verify the migration was successful?
Below is an example content inventory for a hypothetical site using WordPress and
how those items might map to ButterCMS. For information on the various content types,
check out our
core concepts article.
Content inventory template
Phase 2: execution
Once planning is complete, execute the migration:
- Execute and verify backup of your original site
- Disable crawlability during migration
- Execute test migration on a staging environment
- Verify all acceptance criteria on staging
- Perform the real migration of entire content inventory
- Enable the new site and restore crawlability
Never migrate directly to production first. Always use a staging environment to test and verify before going live.
Phase 3: Verification & monitoring
After migration, thorough verification is essential:
- Go through your acceptance criteria
- Manually test content for any overlooked issues
- Check performance and loading times
- Track SEO rankings and indexing
- Monitor analytics for any anomalies
Migration planning checklist
Pre-migration checklist
Execution checklist
Post-migration checklist
Minimizing migration risks
Risk assessment
Before beginning, conduct a thorough risk assessment:
- Identify potential issues (data loss, functionality breakdowns, compatibility problems)
- Analyze the impact each issue could have on your business
- Create mitigation strategies for each risk
Pilot testing
Start small with a non-critical section:
- Select a subset of content for initial migration
- Document any issues encountered
- Use learnings to inform full-scale migration
Fallback plan
Always have a contingency:
- Maintain a fully functional version of your old CMS
- Define clear rollback criteria
- Document the rollback process
Regular backups
Implement a robust backup strategy:
- Full site backups before major migration steps
- Incremental data backups throughout the process
- Regular testing of backup restoration
Setting migration goals
Define clear objectives
Ask yourself:
- Performance Goals - What load time improvements do you expect?
- Developer Experience - What technical capabilities do you need?
- Content Team Experience - How will the authoring workflow improve?
- Scalability Goals - What growth do you anticipate?
- Security Requirements - What compliance or security standards must you meet?
Establish success metrics
Define measurable targets based on your requirements. Here are example metrics to consider:
Timeline considerations
Typical migration phases
Break your migration into smaller milestones. This reduces risk and allows for course corrections along the way.
