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
| Content Type | Current System | ButterCMS Equivalent | Count | Priority |
|---|
| Blog Posts | WordPress Posts | Blog Engine or Page Type | - | High |
| Static Pages | WordPress Pages | Single Pages | - | High |
| Categories | WP Categories | Collections | - | Medium |
| Tags | WP Tags | Collections | - | Medium |
| Authors | WP Users | Collections | - | Medium |
| Media | Media Library | Media Library | - | High |
| Custom Post Types | CPTs | Page Types | - | Varies |
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:
| Goal Area | Metric | Target |
|---|
| Performance | Page load time | < 3 seconds |
| SEO | Preserved rankings | Within 5% of baseline |
| Content | Migration accuracy | 100% content preserved |
| Uptime | Migration downtime | < 4 hours |
| Team adoption | Training completion | 100% team trained |
Timeline considerations
Typical migration phases
| Phase | Activities |
|---|
| Discovery | Content audit, requirements gathering, ButterCMS setup |
| Design | Content model design, schema creation, mapping documentation |
| Development | API integration, frontend updates, migration scripts |
| Content Migration | Data transfer, validation, review |
| Testing | QA, UAT, performance testing |
| Launch | Go-live, monitoring, optimization |
Break your migration into smaller milestones. This reduces risk and allows for course corrections along the way.
