Migrating a website can oftentimes be a daunting task, with a number of important steps and new technology to understand. Don't worry, migrating to ButterCMS, is... well… smooth as butter! Follow along with the different milestones and checkpoints to ensure that your migration into ButterCMS is smooth as butter.
Understand ButterCMS
It is important to understand the three main solutions ButterCMS offers. To build your site in Butter, we offer posts, pages, and collections to manage content.
- Posts- these fit the basic blog use case
- Pages- these are generally used to build out different pages of your site
- Collections- think of a table of data, generally used universally (such as a menu, directory, promotional materials…ect.)
Now that we have an understanding of the different content solutions you can use to build your site, let's focus on how to go about building the site. ButterCMs allows you to select from over 25 different tech stacks. After you've identified your tech stack our Pre-Planning Checklist and API Docs will be very useful tools. These will help guide you through successfully setting up your sitemap, conical URLs, redirects, and preview functionalities.
Map and Track Your Content
With a better understanding of ButterCMS, it's time to map out your site and reimagine your site in ButterCMS. While building out schemas and reimaging pages, we suggest identifying and tracking your most successful and visible pages. This helps ensure your new website is just as successful, if not more, than your current one.
You can use tools like Google Analytics, Plausible, or Mixpannel to help identify and highlight high-traffic pages and create goals for the new site. If your layout is changing, this is the perfect time to create new goals revolving around key indicators such as bounce rates, and SEO.
Bring In Your Content and MetaData
At this point, it is time to begin bringing over meta-data, content, and images. We do have a Write API tool that can help with this process, if you're interested in learning more about Write API reach out to Customer Support about enabling it on your account.
Let’s Test Everything
Now comes the time to test everything! Test the code, links, redirects, and even user logins and password resets if they are pointing to a new site too.
If you're building out your site in a Staging Environment, this is about the time when you would ask Customer Support to clone the environment to Production and then proceed with testing in Production.
Launch!
Once you're confident everything is behaving as expected, it’s time to launch your new site.
With the new site launched, there are just a few more items left to complete. We recommend double-checking links and redirects to make sure everything is working smoothly! We also recommend checking your site map, RSS feeds, and SEO.
Track Your Success
Once the website has been live for a month, it’s a great time to revisit the traffic of new pages compared to the previous traffic and compare performance results.