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3 août 2026 • 4 Minute Read • Stephanie Nardone, Content Marketing Director
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For many content teams, replatforming or launching a new site can seem a bit like moving to a new home. Months have been spent designing your dream home and planning for happily ever after, but as move-in day approaches, you realize you may have underestimated the amount of work involved.
There are messy closets to sort through, decisions to make about what to keep, boxes to label… and that’s all before the main event of actually moving.
The same is true of content migration. Before moving to your new digital home, you need to analyze what you have, decide what belongs, and map out where everything will go. Then comes the potentially tedious task of migrating, reviewing, and fine-tuning.
Just like moving a house, migrating content all on your own can take a lot of effort and often comes with unforeseen obstacles, especially when you still need to juggle day-to-day responsibilities and other priorities.
If you were moving a house and hit a snag, you might call a friend or, better yet, hire movers. When you're moving content, the same idea applies: the right help makes the move faster, smoother, and less costly in effort.
What is Content Migration?
Content migration is a catch-all term for everything required to move content from point A (your current site) to point B (your new experience). How long that journey takes, and the route you choose, depend largely on how much the new experience differs from the old and how much your content needs to change along the way.
3 Types of Content Migration
Broadly speaking, there are three content scenarios. Understanding which one you're facing early on is essential to estimating the work, assigning the right resources, and avoiding surprises that can slow migration.
Scenario 1: Like-for-Like Migration
Moving content into a comparable site structure. Adds a sitemap, content gap analysis and content matrix to map existing content to its new destination.
Scenario 2: Light Migration
Moving content into a similar site structure, while generally maintaining existing templates, components, and the sitemap. May include a light content inventory and bulk keep/cut that don't require changes to the design system or sitemap.
Scenario 3: Transformation Migration
The transformation migration adapts content to a substantially different experience. Allows for a full content strategy and analysis, including alignment with the new user experience, information architecture, and design, and pressure-testing existing content against new components to identify what needs to be restructured, rewritten, or created.
What is the Difference Between Content Production and Content Entry?
Another important aspect of accurately estimating the work involved in a content migration is distinguishing between two common hands-on tasks that are often lumped together: content production and content entry. Doing so helps you assign the right effort where it matters most.
Content production involves building individual pages: configuring components and modules to fit the content and design. It requires knowledge of CMS and design-systems, as well as editorial judgment.
Content entry is the simpler task of copying content into the new platform. It requires less specialized expertise and costs less, but only works when the content already fits its destination.
Digital asset manager (DAM) migrations follow the same logic, with different deliverables: assets generally move into their new home more easily, but the associated data often needs to be rebuilt, including, but not limited to, metadata, taxonomy, search filters, and permissions.
Identifying which tasks your team will need to do, and at what volume, are two other big factors that will help properly assess the time and resources needed for your migration.
What are the Best Ways to Migrate Website Content?
There’s no single turnkey method for content migration. Some pages can be moved at scale, while others need custom scripts or hands-on production. When clients manage migration in-house, those distinctions sometimes blur, and the entire process can inadvertently become manual and less efficient.
That’s where a migration partner makes the difference. By choosing the right method for every page, combining tools and approaches as needed, and taking responsibility for the finished result, the process becomes faster, more efficient, and more cost-effective.
3 Content Migration Methods
1. AI-Automated Migration: The Movers
Large volumes of consistent, structured content, such as articles, biographies and product detail pages, are well-suited for automated migration.
For example, ForgeAI, Verndale’s proprietary AI migration tool, crawls a live site, imports the content types built in the new CMS, and maps extracted content to the destination CMS's templates, fields, and components to prepare migration-ready content for import into the destination CMS.
It can do in an hour what would take a person 10 times as long. With a tool like ForgeAI, months of manual work can be condensed into days.
That said, most automated tools are suitable for migrations of 100 pages or more. They also require a semantically driven content model on both ends and, for redesigns, a finished design. Once complete, editorial QA needs to be conducted, though advanced tools like ForgeAI can help deliver the speed and accuracy needed for large scale migrations.
2. Custom Scripts: The Specialty Movers
For many in-house teams, templates with complex fields or content that can’t be parsed by an automated tool may otherwise need to be migrated by hand. However, a migration partner can develop custom scripts to move this content more efficiently and reduce manual effort.
For example, Verndale’s technology team can develop a custom script for each template. Though development requires upfront effort, it can eliminate hours of repetitive manual work across pages that share the same structure in the long run. This accelerates the individual task of moving those items and, perhaps more importantly, frees up limited resources to focus on the content that truly requires special attention.
3. Manual Content Production and Entry: The Full Service Movers
Some content needs extra care: the homepage, finicky fields, multilingual pages or content that an owner wants to edit during the move.
While manual content entry and production isn't practical at scale, it's sometimes the best choice for high-value, high-traffic pages. This approach offers flexibility, real-time QA and the ability to make editorial and design decisions on the fly. However, it is, of course, slower than automated methods, and requires either prepared copy decks or a content strategist to guide the transfer of copy from the existing site to the new one.
What Steps are Involved in a Content Migration?
Ideally, content migration starts well before moving day. But as a partner to countless organizations, we recognize the reality: content often gets underestimated or even overlooked until that distant launch date suddenly isn’t. Starting earlier helps teams protect time, reduce risk, and keep the migration on track.
Whether we have lots of time to plan or are in a crunch, here are the steps we follow to help our clients get their existing content ready for a new experience.
Step 1: Conduct a Full Content Inventory
Catalog every URL, page, template and component in scope. This establishes the full extent of the migration and provides a starting point for planning the work. If an inventory hasn't already been completed, Verndale has tools to accelerate this process.
Step 2: Sort and Analyze the Content
Not everything on the existing site needs to move. Separate the pages worth keeping from outdated content, redirects, campaign pages, and other material that has accumulated over the years. Identify what should be kept, edited, or retired, and assign templates to the content that will move, so the effort goes where it matters.
For large sites, we find that a rule-based approach is more practical than debating every page individually. Start with an initial assessment, flag content based on age or other agreed criteria, identify duplicates, and apply a simple decision-making rubric. Then ask business leads to validate the recommendations before finalizing.
Step 3: Build the Content Matrix
The content matrix is the document that connects everything. It records each existing URL, its new page name and URL, the destination template and components, and its status.
The matrix also serves as a blueprint for developers. It shows where everything goes, exposes gaps and doubles as a project tracker throughout the migration. The sitemap, content gap analysis and, for transformation migrations, the content consolidation exercise all feed into this matrix.
Step 4: Prepare for Migration
Before content starts moving, establish the standards and workflows that will guide the work. This includes a content model or style guide defining fields, character counts, and image specifications, as well as the content workflow covering approvals, legal review and QA. Prepare copy decks and templates for any new content that needs to be created.
Step 5: Assign a Migration Method and Execute
With the content mapped and prepared, assign each page to the appropriate migration method: automate wherever possible, create custom scripts for exceptions, and develop a detailed plan for managing manual migrations so each page gets the right level of effort.
These tracks can run in parallel, allowing teams to migrate consistent content at scale while giving more complex pages the individual attention they need.
Step 6: Edit, QA, and Launch
Once the content has moved, both a content migration partner, like Verndale, and the in-house team should conduct technical, visual, and editorial reviews to confirm that the content functions as intended in the new experience and delivers the expected result.
For efficiency, it’s important that the internal team can make final editorial updates directly in the platform, while the migration team addresses technical issues, formatting problems, and any content that hasn't transferred correctly.
Your Website Migration is Coming… Let’s Get Moving
If you’re in the process of designing a new experience or have a new build on the horizon, then it’s time to think about content migration. Asking these questions will help you determine your approach, as well as the time and resources involved.
- Will your content move as-is, or will you create new content to fit the new components?
- How many pages need to be moved, and how many templates are involved?
- Are content types consistent within each template?
- Is the content moving into the same design or a new one?
- Where is the content coming from: the current site, copy decks or other documents?
- Do you want to edit content as it moves?
- Are there other considerations, such as multiple languages?
- What’s the timeline or launch deadline?
If answering those questions only raises more questions, we understand, and we're here to help. Content migration, like moving a house, can be an inside job, but it’s a whole lot easier, faster and smoother when you hire professional movers.
You designed your dream house, now let someone who loves moving handle the boxes. Contact Verndale to discuss your content migration needs and discover how the right mix of expertise and tools, including ForgeAI, can help you move faster and launch with confidence.