For Marketing Leads, Digital Managers & Business Owners Planning a Platform Move
Migration doesn't have to mean starting from scratch.
Whether you're a marketing lead worried about losing rankings, a digital manager who inherited a site nobody fully documented, or a business owner who just wants the new CMS live without drama, a migration project raises the same question: what happens to everything we've already built?
We map every page, image, redirect and metadata field before we touch anything, then migrate it methodically rather than in one risky sweep, checking search rankings and site speed hold steady the whole way through. Whatever content management system you're moving to, the process stays the same: careful, methodical, and built around protecting what already works, not around chasing a slicker digital experience at the expense of everything that's currently working.
We map every URL to its new address and keep redirects in place from day one, so the rankings you've earned stay exactly where they are.
“Nobody documented how our current site is actually built.”
We audit your existing content and structure ourselves first, so gaps in old documentation never become gaps in the new site.
“Years of old content, and no idea what's worth keeping.”
We review what's actually working before we migrate it, cutting dead pages and consolidating duplicates so the new site launches leaner than the old one.
“Our last platform change turned into months of downtime.”
We run migrations in a staging environment first, test everything against the live site, then switch over in one controlled go-live with minimal disruption.
The Gecko Way™
Our approach to successful projects
For a migration, gathering starts with an honest audit of what you've actually got, not what you think you've got. We pull a full inventory of pages, media, forms and metadata from your current CMS, map every URL that's earning traffic, and note any integrations, membership areas or custom functionality that need to travel across intact. We also ask the less technical questions: which pages nobody's looked at in years, which ones drive real enquiries, and what your team actually wants to change while everything's already being touched. That combination, technical inventory and honest priority-setting, means we're planning the migration around your real site, not an assumed one. This is also where we settle on the migration strategy and the migration tools that make sense for your specific move, rather than defaulting to the same playbook for every client. We also catalogue your digital assets at this stage, so nothing gets discovered halfway through the build instead of before it.
Once we know what exists, we work out what should actually move. Not every page from a ten-year-old CMS deserves a seat on the new platform, and dragging every duplicate, orphaned page and half-finished blog post across just recreates the same mess somewhere new. We evaluate content against real performance, current relevance and how it maps to what your new CMS can do better, then flag anything we think should be merged, rewritten or retired. We also map redirects at this stage, so nothing that's currently earning search visibility gets left behind when the switch happens. You get a clear plan before a single page moves, not a surprise halfway through. Different CMS platforms handle content differently, so evaluation also means understanding what your new platform actually needs from your existing content, not just what your old one produced.
This is where the migration actually happens: content, media, structure and metadata moved into the new CMS field by field, not dumped in wholesale and tidied up later. We build out your content models and templates first, so everything has somewhere proper to sit, then migrate in batches we can check as we go rather than one enormous file transfer we can't easily unpick if something's wrong. Redirects go live alongside the content itself, integrations and forms get reconnected and tested, and we keep comparing the new site against the old one throughout, page by page, until nothing's been quietly dropped along the way. Where it speeds things up safely, we'll use migration scripts to handle the more repetitive parts of the content transfer, freeing up time for the checks that actually need a human eye.
A successful migration means your team can actually use what's landed, not just admire it from a distance. We walk you through the new CMS properly, how content's structured, where things live now compared to before, and how to make the day-to-day edits you used to rely on a developer for. If anything's changed meaningfully, page templates, how images get uploaded, how forms route through, we document it clearly rather than assuming it's obvious. The goal is that the people who ran your old site feel just as confident running the new one, without a manual nobody reads or a support ticket every time something needs changing. The aim is genuine content autonomy: your content authors should be able to run their own content workflows afterwards without waiting on a developer for routine changes.
Go-live isn't the finish line for a migration, it's the point where we start proving nothing broke. We check rankings, redirects, page speed and analytics in the days after launch, catching anything a search engine or a real visitor might notice before it becomes a problem you hear about first. Beyond that, we stay close: ongoing support, hosting and further development are all part of the same conversation, so if something about the new CMS needs adjusting three months in, you're talking to the same team who moved you there, not starting again with someone new. As your migration agency, that's also when we keep the closest eye on SEO rankings, since the weeks right after go-live are when any wobble is most likely to show up.
What's Included in a CMS Migration
Content & Media Migration
Every page, blog post, image, document and piece of copy on your current site gets moved across to the new CMS, not just the obvious top-level pages. We work through your full content inventory systematically, checking formatting, internal links and image alt text survive the move rather than breaking quietly in the background.
Where content's genuinely out of date or duplicated, we'll flag it rather than migrating it blindly, so you're not paying to move dead weight into a brand new system. This is website content migration in the fullest sense: not a copy-paste job, but a considered transfer that treats years of accumulated content as something worth protecting properly.
That covers every image, document and media asset on the site, plus the digital assets and SEO metadata attached to each page, so nothing arrives in your new content management system half-finished. This is Content Migration Services done properly: nothing left half-migrated because it seemed too minor to bother with.
URL Mapping & Redirects
We map every existing URL on your site against its new equivalent before migration starts, then build the redirect rules that carry search rankings and inbound links across intact. This matters more than almost anything else in a CMS migration: get redirects wrong and years of SEO value can disappear within days of going live.
We test redirects thoroughly before launch, check for redirect chains and loops, and keep monitoring rankings and organic traffic closely in the weeks after go-live to catch anything that needs adjusting fast. This kind of URL mapping and redirect mapping usually goes hand in hand: building a full 301 redirect map before a single URL changes, and checking your new URL structure doesn't accidentally break the structured data search engines already trust.
CMS Data Migration
Behind the content you can see sits the data your CMS actually runs on: custom fields, taxonomies, user accounts, form submissions and structured content types. We handle this CMS data migration carefully, mapping your existing data structures to their new equivalents rather than assuming a like-for-like fit, because most platforms organise content differently under the bonnet.
Where the new CMS handles something better than the old one, we'll build for that improvement rather than recreating an old limitation out of habit. The result is a new site that's genuinely native to its new platform, not a patched-together copy of the old one.
The same care applies whether your new platform uses a traditional content model or sits within a headless CMS setup, since a headless stack often structures data quite differently behind the scenes, and getting that structured data mapped properly is what makes the whole migration hold together.
Structure & Taxonomy Rebuild
A straight lift-and-shift often just carries old problems into a new system. We take the migration as a chance to properly rebuild your site's structure and taxonomy, tightening navigation, fixing categorisation that never quite worked, and making sure content's organised in a way that actually reflects how visitors and search engines find it.
This isn't a redesign, it's a structural clean-up that happens naturally while everything's already being touched. You end up with a site that's easier to manage internally too, because content lives where it logically should, not where it happened to end up over several years of ad hoc additions.
Getting content structure right matters more with some CMS platforms than others, since a few make it far easier to reorganise later and some make it a genuine headache.
Integrations & Third-Party Reconnection
Most sites depend on more than the CMS itself: CRMs, booking systems, email marketing tools, payment gateways, analytics and tracking. We identify every integration your current site relies on and reconnect each one to the new platform, testing that data still flows correctly in both directions rather than assuming a plugin swap will just work.
Where an integration doesn't have a direct equivalent on the new CMS, we'll tell you early and talk through the alternatives, rather than discovering the gap after launch when it's harder to fix. Nothing that currently keeps your business running quietly stops working because the CMS underneath it changed.
Some of this happens through a straightforward API-based integration, others need more bespoke work, and we'll use whatever migration tools genuinely fit rather than forcing every connection through the same method. This matters even more with a headless CMS, where the platform itself often does nothing without integrations doing the actual connecting work.
Post-Migration QA & Testing
Before anything goes live, we test the new site against the old one methodically: every page compared, every form submitted, every redirect checked, every integration verified. We look at page speed, mobile rendering, accessibility and search visibility, not just whether the pages load. After launch, we keep monitoring closely for the first few weeks, because migration issues don't always show up on day one, some only surface once search engines have properly recrawled the new site.
That ongoing check is as much a part of the migration as the move itself. That includes checking Core Web Vitals and overall web performance, since a dip in performance score can undo a chunk of the SEO benefit of migrating in the first place, plus a proper content parity check and a final look at structured data to make sure nothing's dropped out of the code that search engines rely on.
What's Included in a CMS Migration
Content & Media Migration
Every page, blog post, image, document and piece of copy on your current site gets moved across to the new CMS, not just the obvious top-level pages. We work through your full content inventory systematically, checking formatting, internal links and image alt text survive the move rather than breaking quietly in the background.
Where content's genuinely out of date or duplicated, we'll flag it rather than migrating it blindly, so you're not paying to move dead weight into a brand new system. This is website content migration in the fullest sense: not a copy-paste job, but a considered transfer that treats years of accumulated content as something worth protecting properly.
That covers every image, document and media asset on the site, plus the digital assets and SEO metadata attached to each page, so nothing arrives in your new content management system half-finished. This is Content Migration Services done properly: nothing left half-migrated because it seemed too minor to bother with.
URL Mapping & Redirects
We map every existing URL on your site against its new equivalent before migration starts, then build the redirect rules that carry search rankings and inbound links across intact. This matters more than almost anything else in a CMS migration: get redirects wrong and years of SEO value can disappear within days of going live.
We test redirects thoroughly before launch, check for redirect chains and loops, and keep monitoring rankings and organic traffic closely in the weeks after go-live to catch anything that needs adjusting fast. This kind of URL mapping and redirect mapping usually goes hand in hand: building a full 301 redirect map before a single URL changes, and checking your new URL structure doesn't accidentally break the structured data search engines already trust.
CMS Data Migration
Behind the content you can see sits the data your CMS actually runs on: custom fields, taxonomies, user accounts, form submissions and structured content types. We handle this CMS data migration carefully, mapping your existing data structures to their new equivalents rather than assuming a like-for-like fit, because most platforms organise content differently under the bonnet.
Where the new CMS handles something better than the old one, we'll build for that improvement rather than recreating an old limitation out of habit. The result is a new site that's genuinely native to its new platform, not a patched-together copy of the old one.
The same care applies whether your new platform uses a traditional content model or sits within a headless CMS setup, since a headless stack often structures data quite differently behind the scenes, and getting that structured data mapped properly is what makes the whole migration hold together.
Structure & Taxonomy Rebuild
A straight lift-and-shift often just carries old problems into a new system. We take the migration as a chance to properly rebuild your site's structure and taxonomy, tightening navigation, fixing categorisation that never quite worked, and making sure content's organised in a way that actually reflects how visitors and search engines find it.
This isn't a redesign, it's a structural clean-up that happens naturally while everything's already being touched. You end up with a site that's easier to manage internally too, because content lives where it logically should, not where it happened to end up over several years of ad hoc additions.
Getting content structure right matters more with some CMS platforms than others, since a few make it far easier to reorganise later and some make it a genuine headache.
Integrations & Third-Party Reconnection
Most sites depend on more than the CMS itself: CRMs, booking systems, email marketing tools, payment gateways, analytics and tracking. We identify every integration your current site relies on and reconnect each one to the new platform, testing that data still flows correctly in both directions rather than assuming a plugin swap will just work.
Where an integration doesn't have a direct equivalent on the new CMS, we'll tell you early and talk through the alternatives, rather than discovering the gap after launch when it's harder to fix. Nothing that currently keeps your business running quietly stops working because the CMS underneath it changed.
Some of this happens through a straightforward API-based integration, others need more bespoke work, and we'll use whatever migration tools genuinely fit rather than forcing every connection through the same method. This matters even more with a headless CMS, where the platform itself often does nothing without integrations doing the actual connecting work.
Post-Migration QA & Testing
Before anything goes live, we test the new site against the old one methodically: every page compared, every form submitted, every redirect checked, every integration verified. We look at page speed, mobile rendering, accessibility and search visibility, not just whether the pages load. After launch, we keep monitoring closely for the first few weeks, because migration issues don't always show up on day one, some only surface once search engines have properly recrawled the new site.
That ongoing check is as much a part of the migration as the move itself. That includes checking Core Web Vitals and overall web performance, since a dip in performance score can undo a chunk of the SEO benefit of migrating in the first place, plus a proper content parity check and a final look at structured data to make sure nothing's dropped out of the code that search engines rely on.
"I still open the old sitemap next to the new one when I'm mapping redirects, because that's the only way to catch the pages nobody remembers exist but a client's customers still land on every week."
John Logan, Full Stack Developer at Gecko
CMS Migration Case Study
[Case study pending confirmation. When a suitable project with confirmed metrics is available, this section should cover a real migration: what the client's old CMS looked like, what was moved, and what happened to their rankings and traffic afterwards.]
It depends on how much content you've got and how complex your current site is, but most CMS migrations we run take somewhere between four and ten weeks from kick-off to go-live. Sites with a smaller number of pages, straightforward content types and few third-party integrations sit at the shorter end. Larger sites with years of accumulated content, custom functionality or multiple integrations to reconnect take longer, mainly because we're testing thoroughly rather than rushing the move. We'll give you a realistic timeline once we've seen your current site properly, rather than a generic estimate before we know what we're working with. As your migration agency, we'd always rather take an extra week to get the content management system genuinely right than rush a date that was never realistic in the first place.
Not if it's done properly, which is exactly why we treat redirects and URL mapping as one of the most important parts of the whole project, not an afterthought. Every existing URL gets mapped to its new equivalent before we migrate anything, and we test those redirects thoroughly before go-live. Some fluctuation in rankings after any site change is normal, search engines need time to recrawl and reindex, but a properly planned migration shouldn't cause a meaningful drop. We monitor rankings and organic traffic closely in the weeks after launch specifically to catch and fix anything early, rather than finding out weeks later that something's gone wrong. We also keep a close eye on Core Web Vitals and build out the full 301 redirect map early, since both matter more to search engines than people often assume.
CMS migration is about moving your existing content, structure and data from your current platform onto a new one. CMS implementation is the technical build of that new platform itself, setting up the CMS, building templates and getting the underlying system ready. In practice, the two often happen alongside each other on the same project: we implement the new platform and migrate your content onto it as part of one connected piece of work. If you're planning a full platform change, it's worth talking to us about both from the start, rather than treating them as entirely separate projects. Search for content management services and you'll find providers who blur the two together, but we think Content Migration Services and CMS Implementation deserve separate scoping, because they involve genuinely different skills and different risks.
We migrate content and structure from most major CMS platforms, WordPress, Drupal, Umbraco, Sitecore and various bespoke or legacy systems among them. What matters more than the specific platform you're moving from is how well-documented (or not) your current site is, since that shapes how much discovery work we need to do upfront. If you're moving from something genuinely unusual or heavily customised, we'll be upfront early on about anything that needs extra investigation, rather than assuming every CMS behaves the same way underneath. That includes headless CMS setups too, though the specific approach depends on how your source and destination platforms each handle content structurally.
We identify every integration your current site relies on, CRM connections, booking tools, email marketing platforms, payment systems, analytics, before migration starts, and reconnect each one to the new CMS as part of the project. We test that data still flows correctly in both directions rather than assuming a straightforward swap will work, because integrations are often where migrations quietly go wrong if they're not checked properly. If an integration doesn't have a direct equivalent on your new platform, we'll flag that early and talk through the alternatives together, so there are no surprises after launch.
No, a migration doesn't require a redesign, though it's a natural point to tidy up structure, navigation and content organisation while everything's already being touched. Some clients want to keep their current design largely as it is and just move the underlying platform; others use the migration as a chance to refresh things properly. Both are entirely reasonable, and we'll scope the project around whichever fits what you actually need, rather than assuming a migration automatically means a visual overhaul.
Part of our evaluation stage is working out what's genuinely worth migrating and what isn't. Duplicate pages, outdated blog posts and content nobody's looked at in years don't automatically get carried across just because they exist on the old site. We'll flag anything we think should be merged, rewritten or retired, and talk it through with you before making the call, since you know your business and your audience better than we do. The goal is a new site that's leaner and more useful than the old one, not a like-for-like copy of everything that came before.
Access to your current CMS is the main thing, along with anyone on your side who knows how the site's actually used day to day, even informally. We'll take it from there with a full audit of your existing content and structure. If you've got details of any integrations, custom functionality or particular pages that are business-critical, that's useful early on too, though we'll uncover most of this ourselves during the gather phase regardless. Want to talk through what a migration would look like for your site specifically? [Get in touch] and we'll take you through it properly.
