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Moving copy and assets to your new site
Your website may have hundreds or even thousands of pages. Most likely, the majority of that content spans across various blog, news, resource, and event post types and all of that can be cumbersome to move manually.
Luckily, we can migrate existing content to the new website via database migration instead of manually copying and pasting, saving significant time and resources.
During a database migration, we’ll attempt to migrate your database-driven copy, images, files, title tags, meta descriptions, tags, categories, and authors to your new site’s appropriate locations for that content.
Our process for migrating content
Carefully planning the content migration is key to success.
By carefully planning each step, you can minimize risks and disruptions during the database migration, ensuring a successful and efficient transition of web content.
1. Obtain access to your CMS
We’ll audit your existing website CMS to figure out what data can be extracted via CSV or XML in preparation for database migration.
2. Receive database migration confirmation
After the audit, we’ll present our recommendation for all database migration work and ask for your confirmation to move forward.
Additionally, if you’re actively posting new content to the old website, we’ll need to discuss the appropriate timing to ensure all articles are on the new website at the time of launch. There will likely be a period where new content on your existing site will also need to be entered on your newly created site.
3. Migrate the database
This is where our developers do their magic! We’ll import the data for all confirmed post-types to bring it into the new site.
4. Review and clean up
After the content has been migrated, we recommend that you spot-check the data. Since this is an automated process and we are moving content from one site to another, you will likely have to do some minimal clean-up work. If this is something you would like additional support with please reach out to your PM so you can discuss options.
After the content has been migrated…
It’s time to inspect and clean up the content!
The content from your old site is likely to have some styling that doesn’t look as good in your new design. Plan ahead for this, knowing it will need your attention at or around launch time.
Now’s the time to give your content a facelift or create a plan to prioritize changes after the website is live.
A quick note
If you want to remove any old posts after the database migration, simply make the changes in the CMS after the final import.
It is important to wait for the final import because any changes made might be overwritten if another import is scheduled.
Database FAQs
Common database migration scenarios and recommendations
These are example scenarios and may not be applicable to your website.
Current scenario: The current page is a long scrolling page and consists of a basic block with many paragraphs of text.
Request: You want to make the page fancier on the new website.
Issue: In order to make the page fancier, you’ll have to spend time manually migrating the existing copy into a page block heavy page. Depending on how many pages require this effort, it could take a LONG time to move forward with this approach.
Recommendation: Migrate all existing pages “as is” via database. Create a plan to write any new pages using the new fancy design and for any existing pages you want to update, create a plan to prioritize the ones that receive traffic and convert.
Current scenario: The current page is a post-type, but it is built with custom modules already.
Request: You want to migrate these posts via database to save time and budget.
Issue: Since the current page is using modules or a custom builder tool, the content is very likely going to need a lot of work after the intial migration to ensure it looks good on the new site as well.
Recommendation: Migrate the content via database knowing that the content will need attention after it is migrated. Create a plan to prioritize and reformat the important high-traffic and high-converting pages and the continue to review and update the remaining lower-priority pages post-launch.
Current scenario: The current website is built on a custom platform that does not have a database.
Request: You want to migrate specific URLs via database to save time and budget.
Issue: There’s not an export tool available on your current website.
Recommendation: We have a custom-built tool that can crawl your website URLs and extract data. As long as the content is organized in a consistent matter, we can get the data into a spreadsheet that can be imported into the new website. Discuss this option with your PM!
Current scenario: You were actively posting content on the former website, but did not regularly consider accessibility standards (i.e., image alt text, descriptive links, heading order, etc.).
Request: The new website and all content that is being migrated via database must be AA compliant.
Issue: You have hundreds of pages of content that need to be updated to meet the compliance standards.
Recommendation: Avoid delaying launch. The old content wasn’t compliant, but can be. It will just take time. Ensure new content adheres to compliance when entering into the CMS, and develop a plan to update all previously migrated content post-launch.