Content migrations are a huge deal and they can be a major headache. But for producers of content such as magazines, newspapers, and alt weeklies, they are also a vital part of moving or rebuilding your website.
Imports are vitally important to maintaining continuity of your content when rebuilding and moving to a new content management system. Almost no two sets of data are alike, that is, because almost no two websites are alike. So, it is important to thoroughly evaluate the state of your content to ascertain the scope and complexity of any import.
What are the important goals of an import?
Obviously, getting your content from one system to the other is the main thing that is happening with a migration. But there are lots of technical details within that process...
Preservation of Your Content
Maintaining the quality of your archived content with minimal loss of important elements such as images, slideshows, videos, special pages, etc.
Responsive Design for Mobile
For example, These days, converting rigid elements within content to be compatible with responsive design.
Benefits of migrating?
When moving to a system with structured data, unstructured data will be cleaned up and structured.
The benefits are:
- better performance in the “create once, view everywhere” paradigm
- better data portability
New Site Structure and SEO
When moving from one CMS to another, there will ALWAYS be differences in the structure of of the new site. Building a new site also gives site owners the opportunity to clean things up and improve site structure.
That means...
- Any data import script MUST create what are called 301 redirects from the location of the old content to the new one.
- To tell the search engines that your content has permanently moved to a new address – thus transferring whatever Google juice has been accumulated by each piece of content.
So, how is this done?
This all seems easy right? I mean, all we are doing is taking all your articles from this place and putting them over here. Ah but, what is an easy concept to grasp is technically very challenging and time consuming, because the programmer has to understand how both systems work and write a program to transfer data from one system to the other.
There are often multiple ways of doing the same thing. As a result, doing a successful migration, requires patience, attention to detail, and strong collaboration between the publisher and the web developers.
Before the Migration
The first thing you need to do is make a plan.
- What content gets moved to the new website and what stays? Old blogs? Old events? Etc.
- What are the top URLs that are linked to from outside? Google Search Console will help define these.
- Can you separate the time sensitive content from “evergreen?”
- How far back do you go?
- What’s the deadline? Realistically, any quality data migration should be counted weeks or even months.
- Data dump – you will need to provide the development team with a sample of your data. This will inform the process and help define the scope of the migration (time and money). What you see when you look at your website, does not necessarily inform you as to the structure of your data.
- A point of contact within your organization that knows your content well
During the Migration
The important process, once started, involves a lot of iterations.
- There is an initial data export that is used to write the script.
- Then, various imports are loaded to a test server.
- Publishers are then asked to look through content and make comments or decisions about the the migration based on their goals restructuring their content.
- Also, invariable surprises will arise that don’t fit perfectly into the plan. These will require decisions and sign-off by the publisher.
- Because most sites are still being loaded with new content throughout the migration process, there is a final export right before launch that includes the newest content since the previous data export.
- This usually involves last minute fixes.
After the Migration
Once the import is done and the new site is live, there is some follow-up.
- Immediately, publishers will have to register their sitemap with the search engines.
- Publishers will also need to keep an eye on their site using Google's Search Console looking for broken links.
- Manually adding redirects will likely be required for things missed during the import.
- Make an attractive 404 page so that you can diminish the abrupt experience of a 404 for your readers.
- Expect traffic to drop off for at least a month before it starts to recover.
