CMS Migration Planning Guide
IntermediateQuick Answer
TL;DR
A CMS migration has six phases: discovery, platform selection, content modeling, migration scripting, testing and QA, and cutover with redirects. Skipping or rushing any phase is the primary cause of failed migrations. Budget 4–16 weeks for a typical project — small sites land at the lower end, enterprise deployments with complex integrations at the higher end.
Key Takeaways
- Define success criteria and stakeholder sign-off requirements before writing any migration code
- Content modeling is the most underestimated phase — a poor model creates problems that outlast the migration itself
- Run at least two full dry-run migrations on a staging environment before touching production
- Prepare 301 redirects and a new sitemap before go-live, not after