The Benefits of Migrating Your Site to a New CMS (And How to Do it Right)

It’s not an easy task to completely move your website to a whole new CMS platform. However, doing this (and doing it right) can have several important benefits for your business. These range from functionality improvements to a streamlining of your editorial and publishing processes. 

In this article, I’ll outline some of the major reasons you might wish to migrate to a new CMS and give you a few tips on how you can go about this, to help make the process as smooth as possible. 

Find out how to improve the user experience of your e-commerce or publishing business with a custom-built CMS and WordPress theme from Powered By Coffee.

Access to better features and functionality 

As businesses grow, there’s often an evolving need to factor in new processes and functions. This could be the distribution of your content to new platforms and devices or changing the way your marketing team create and manage your content on the CMS.

A new CMS, built specifically for your business, could give you access to a range of new features that modify and improve the way you do business. Tools, plug-ins, automation processes and dashboard layouts can all dramatically cut down the time your employees need to spend manually performing certain menial tasks.

Scale your business

As your business grows, your CMS will remain a central platform for all your online marketing processes. Often, a standard CMS template will fail when it comes to meeting the demands of a larger organisation, which handles a greater volume of content as well as user traffic.

Moving to a CMS that can adapt and facilitate your expansion plans – rather than present barriers – is a major reason that investing in a new model before your enterprise gets too big is a great idea. 

Update your look and workflow

The act of starting afresh can be an important part of a business’s evolution. If you've recently gone through a rebrand for instance, now would be a good time to implement your updated brand guidelines across your website.

Not only this, but you can change the whole user journey for your visitors if you wish – to better reflect the kind of company you are and promote your most important services. While it’s not advised to completely alter your site’s structure and URLs, you can certainly fine-tune its set-up to improve the experience that users have when using your website. 

Improve security

Content management systems are a clear target for hacking, especially in the case of e-commerce platforms that process a high volume of online payments, or websites that have access to huge amounts of user data that can be manipulated by scamsters. 

A site migration is a great opportunity to identify any vulnerabilities your old site may have had, and protect against these security holes with your new CMS build. 

Build a stronger customer base

You can underpin your various social media and online marketing campaigns with your CMS. Firstly, your new system can be used to manage your social media publishing calendar in one central location while giving you detailed feedback on things like user activity and the demographic breakdowns of your loyal visitors. This information can then be used to inform new campaigns and promotions. 

Maintain brand consistency 

With the right CMS set up, you can make sure your website delivers a harmonious experience to your online customers. Things like design elements, fonts, colours, images, animations and logos can all be maintained more effectively through your CMS, with the help of a number of automated  processes.

Top 10 best practices for a site migration

If you’d like to know how you can go about getting this process in the right way, take a look at our recent blog article that delves into the topic in detail. But, for a crash course, I’ve outlined the essentials for you below.

• Perform a site evaluation

Create a full record of everything on your existing site, including a full list of URLs.

• Make a record of your current website’s analytics

Create a clear record of your Google Analytics data before you migrate, which can be used as a benchmark for your new site's progress. 

• Identify top-performing pages 

Identify the most important pages on your site in terms of SEO ranking and protect these assets in your new website when it is live. 

• Don’t make too many changes. 

Avoid completely altering your site structure, as this could result in a significant drop of traffic to your site.

• Test before you do

Ask your CMS provider or migration project manager to test out your new CMS in private mode before making it public. 

• Back up your information

Create a backup of all your website data, including photos, content, contacts and other useful assets.  

• Schedule your migration during a slow period

Initiate your CMS migration when you are not experiencing heavy traffic volumes and won’t suffer from a pause in your online activities. 

• Redirect all changed links

To help users and search engines find pages that were on your old site and have moved to a new location, make sure all redirects are working. 

• Identify and address any issues post-migration 

Addressing any technical issues ASAP will help to retain your site’s online performance and presence. 

• Make it someone’s job to oversee this whole process

Hire a dedicated project manager or team of CMS experts to facilitate the various actions required during a site migration.

Seek advice

Whether you’d like us to help you with your CMS migration or simply offer you some words of advice when it comes to deciding if a migration is actually the right move in the first place, get in touch. Myself or one of my team members at Powered By Coffee will be happy to offer some guidance.