A practical guide to structured content migrations

Most content migrations fail for the same reason: they start with the destination instead of the source. Before touching the new CMS, you need an honest map of what you actually have — and almost nobody has one.

Step 1: audit before you map

Export everything and count it. How many posts, how many pages, how many orphaned assets, how many fields are actually populated versus technically available. Every migration surprise we've ever had was visible in this audit; we just hadn't looked.

Step 2: design the destination model first

Write the new collections — fields, relationships, requiredness — before writing a single line of import code. The mapping document that falls out of this step is your contract: source field, destination field, transformation, and what happens when the source data is missing or malformed.

Step 3: validate on a sample, then automate

Run the import on fifty representative documents and diff them by hand. URL slugs, embedded media, and rich-text formatting are where data hides and dies. Once the sample is clean, automate the full run — and keep the importer idempotent so re-runs are free.

The final cutover is then almost boring: run the import, spot-check, flip DNS. Boring is exactly what you want a migration to be.