Custom CMS SEO Migration: An SEO Expert's Guide to Avoiding Heartache
Moving to a New CMS?
Migrate to a new content management system without the tears…or drop in search engine rankings. Our technical SEO experts are here to explain what migrating to a new CMS actually means and how to carry out the perfect custom CMS SEO migration.
How Our Clients Did Last Month
Month-over-month traffic trends. Source: Google Search Console
What Is a CMS?
A content management system, or CMS, is a platform that allows you to create, save, manage, and store content on your website without needing to know extensive coding language. Many CMS platforms are designed for the everyday user and make it really easy to find the perfect template; drag-and-drop page elements; and optimise user experience.
But you already know what a CMS is—ever heard of WordPress, HubSpot, Wix, Squarespace, Salesforce, Drupal, and Shopify? We’re sure if you’re reading this, you’re probably already well-acquainted with your own CMS, which leads us to our next point…
What Is a Custom CMS Migration?
We’re talking about transferring a website’s content that has been built from an out-of-the-box CMS to a new software that has been designed to serve a specific website or business—all while making sure that its SEO rankings and traffic improve, or otherwise stay the same.
Customisation can offer your business greater flexibility, scalability, and control, but it often requires more resources for development and maintenance, as you probably know by now. But because of its complexity, a migration of this type can be tricky and will likely need a fair bit of planning and preparation.
Other Types of SEO Migrations
In the land of SEO, the word ‘migration’ is a bit loaded, as it can mean more than one thing. To us, a website migration can also refer to one of the following activities:
- 1. You're absorbing a newly acquired site into your current one
- 2. You’re planning a business and/or domain name change
- 3. Your content is undergoing a major overhaul (pages are being culled, rewritten, etc.)
It doesn’t matter what migration scenario it is, it will require thoughtful and meticulous planning to avoid big mistakes.
Risks of Migrating to a New CMS Without a Proper Migration Plan
In order to understand what’s at risk with a bad site migration, it’s important to know why we do these migration checklists in the first place.
A Successful CMS Migration Preserves Your
Traffic
You’ve worked hard to get those traffic numbers. A migration makes sure the flow stays the same.
During the process of moving from one CMS to another, each link is carefully accounted for and added to a list in order of traffic and importance. This list will later be used in the post-migration phase to ensure your top-performing links have been properly redirected and that there is no interruption to your traffic.
Rankings
Maintaining site visibility throughout the migration process is possible with just a little careful planning.
One thing that we want to carry over to the new website CMS is your rankings. To preserve your precious spot on search engine result pages (or to even improve them in some cases), we need to make sure that the user experience stays the same or gets better. Preventing broken links and redirect chains with migration best practices can help keep your rankings steady.
Content
Migrating from your current CMS to a new one does pose the risk of some of your content getting lost in the transfer, especially if your site is large or if you’re planning on culling content. But with a proper SEO migration, this risk is all but eliminated.
Why You Should Migrate to a Custom CMS Platform
CMS products vary widely. Many popular products offer easy functionality and intuitive features for artists, entrepreneurs, or small businesses who only need the basics. They’re great for certain lightweight applications, but limited in what they can offer in terms of customisation, SEO integration, and scalability.
Other CMS platforms, like WordPress, are much more versatile, and allow your development team to heavily modify templates, add plug-ins, and customise page elements for better SEO.
But if you’re looking for something that’s truly tailored to your organisation’s functionalities, integrations, and workflows, speak with your development team about custom CMS solutions.
Your CMS Migration Checklist
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s go down the list of steps and best practices:
#1
#1: Build the Dream Team
We don’t pretend that a CMS migration is something you can easily do on your own. In fact, our first step is to build a solid team around you that can help you in this endeavour. Luckily for you, you’ve already got a development team in your ranks. Now you just need your SEO crew to oversee the process.
#2
#2: Establish Your Migration Roles Early
Based on our experience, migrations start off on the wrong foot when the parties involved don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. We recommend that your marketing and content teams take responsibility for URL mapping while the dev team handles the URL redirects. As for your SEO team, they should be responsible for overseeing the transition and for auditing the site after it’s live.
#3
#3: Collect Your URL Data
Will every URL stay the exact same or are there some that aren’t worth transferring over? Now is the perfect time to prioritise your pages from the most visited to the least. Listing your URLs this way will give you a better idea of which pages are safe to cull or edit.
What you should end up with is a list of pages and their Google Search Console clicks from the last 12 months, or Views (previously Page Views) in Google Analytics 4 if you’re less SEO-focused and just want to know which pages get visited.
#4
#4: Gather Third-Party Script Documentation
Do you rely on third-party extensions or other platforms? Whether or not your new custom CMS will replace some of this third-party functionality, your dev and SEO teams need to know what you’re using, e.g.:
- Google Search Console (essential for SEO)
- Google Tag Manager
- Salesforce
- Microsoft Clarity
- Hubspot
- Dealfront
- Lead Forensics
- Mouseflow
- Etc.
#5
#5: Take Your Custom CMS for a Test Spin
Make sure to test your new CMS to see if it really does deliver all the functionality it promised and any other reasons you chose to adopt it. It’s better to test early and extensively before you get stuck with a system that’s either no better or potentially worse than what you have now (we’ve seen it happen).
#6
#6: Go Live
It’s showtime at the Apollo, and all we can say is, don’t schedule your migration on a Friday afternoon when your dev and SEO buddies are about to walk out the door. We recommend you pencil it in on a Monday when everyone’s around in case of a fire, which there won’t be because it’s going to launch without incident (a positive mindset always helps).
Go ahead and tell your SEO team that the new site is live so they can go in and check that all scripts are running correctly and that no pages have been accidentally set to noindex. They will also make an address change request in Google Search Console, if necessary.
#7
#7: Check Your Links with Your Trusty SEO Team
Unfold that URL list from your back pocket because now is the time to check that the following has happened:
- All your URLs are working properly
- Culled pages have been correctly redirected to other more relevant pages
- Redirect chains haven’t been accidentally created in the process
This is an important step to make sure that your previous traffic still has somewhere to go.
#8
#8: Schedule Checkups With Your SEO Team
At this stage, the developer’s job is winding down (at least for this task), but the SEO specialist has a long way to go. Now that the migration is complete and the new CMS has taken over, you’ll want to make sure that your SEO team checks your rankings, traffic, and new site map’s indexation rate at regular intervals.
At Geeky Tech, we do this after a week, then again a week after that. We also go back and check at the 30-, 60-, and 90-day mark because this is a good length of time to observe and report any major traffic fluctuations. We don’t make the rules, but we think this should be standard practice in the SEO industry.
And that, as they say, is that.
How Do You Know If Your Migration Is Successful?
What does a successful migration look like after 90 days? The easiest way to tell is if you and your dev team have moved on and are enjoying the fruits of your custom CMS and your migration anxieties are a thing of the past.
Your SEO team doesn’t need to continually monitor your site from a post-migration perspective at this point if everything is running smoothly.
Frequently Asked Questions About Migrating to a New CMS
- Do you have the technical knowledge and experience required to perform a migration?
- How different will your new CMS be from your old CMS setup?
- Do you have the time and resources to manage the migration without affecting other operations?
- Do you know what to do in the event of technical issues, data loss, or a drop in rankings and traffic?
During the pre-migration phase, your SEO team should add all third-party scripts to a website migration checklist and document the purpose and details of each one. During the migration, your development team will ensure that each script has been reimplemented correctly, and after the launch, your SEO agency will then perform an audit to ensure the scripts are running smoothly on the new CMS.
Migrations are like animals that have been released back in the wild. They will need to be monitored closely at first, but once they’ve had a chance to acclimate, only periodic checks are needed to ensure they’ve settled properly. At Geeky Tech, we monitor your traffic and rankings at weeks one and two, and then at months one, two, and three for our migration clients.
CMS migrations present several common challenges if not carried out using advanced SEO best practices. Managing and documenting URL changes is essential for avoiding broken links and maintaining your SEO performance.
Making sure your content is accurately transferred and formatted takes experience, and technical issues may arise due to differences in infrastructure between CMS platforms. Re-implementing and testing third-party scripts, such as analytics and tracking, can be tricky without prior experience.
About to switch out your old CMS and plan to do the migration yourself? Before migration day, you should first make a list of all the URLs on your site and put them in order of traffic volume. Decide what you want to do with low-volume or no-volume URLs.
For pages you want to cull, be sure to assign them to another relevant page. Take note of third-party scripts and any other functionalities that need to be carried over to the new CMS. Create a plan to redirect old URLs to new ones. Ensure all data is backed up to prevent loss during the migration. Work with your dev team to set up a test environment to identify and fix potential issues before going live.
On launch day, review your pages and your new sitemap to see that they are being indexed. We recommend checking your rankings and traffic in the first few weeks and then every month after that for three months.
It depends on what’s being migrated and the size of your site. If there are many pages and third-party scripts, i.e., if you have a high volume of product pages, then you will likely need to spend a few weeks before the go-live date documenting and prioritising each URL. And as we said earlier, expect to monitor your migration for 90 days after the go-live date.
