Migrating to a Headless CMS

Considering a migration to a new CMS? We explore the process in its entirety - including the pitfalls (we all know it’s not sunshine and rainbows)!

Migration considerations

Migration of an existing site needs to consider a large number of factors. While not an exhaustive list, some examples are listed below:

• Does your new CMS meet the requirements of your team and users? 

• What does your audience NEED to maintain conversions? How can you map this to the new structure in terms of search behaviour and intent? 

• From an SEO perspective, how do your pages currently rank? What’s their authority and content? How does this translate to the new website? 

Without these and other considerations, the ramifications can be severe. Poorly carried out migrations can result in anything from loss of key functionality, loss of organic rankings, and ultimately a loss of revenue, with customers going elsewhere.

Managing a migration

Well, this is where LAB can help.  We have experience in migrating complex websites from a monolithic architecture to newer, headless CMS’ and working with our sister company Reflect Digital - a performance marketing agency - to ensure that the experience for both you and your end users, is seamless.

Here at LAB, we’re CMS agnostic, we match your functional, technical, financial, and future requirements against our industry-leading CMS partners, to ensure you’re getting the best solution possible, based on your unique needs. 

We understand that familiarity with an existing CMS platform can be a blocker for moving to a new CMS, so we make sure that training and documentation are provided to ensure a smooth transition, for the marketing team that will be using it on a day-to-day basis moving forward.

Design and Discovery

Throughout the Discovery and Design phases of the project, we make sure that we fully understand your business, and by putting your audience at the centre of our approach we’re able to create better UX workflows, and technical solutions to your business challenges.  We also use this time to work with our colleagues at Reflect Digital to ensure that marketing best practices and SEO optimisation are baked into the site from the start.

During these phases we address the look and feel of the site, utilising any brand guidelines, we also look at the site from a UX and structural perspective, to understand if improvements can be made to user journeys, and how your target audience can complete their journey (finding the right article, filling out a contact form, or purchasing a product), in the most efficient way possible.

Development

Throughout the build phase, we continue to keep you informed and ensure we’re both aligned and the project progresses.  Following completion of the build and internal testing, the site is made available for User Acceptance Testing, where it is your opportunity to review the website in a completed state and highlight any changes or issues you might find, it’s also the stage where content can be loaded.

Once we have the final sign-off following the UAT phase, we look to schedule a time for the site migration to occur.  We will work alongside your internal marketing team, IT teams, and other main stakeholders to ensure that everyone is clear on roles and responsibilities, as we work through our pre and post-launch checklists.

Pre-migration

Pre-launch checks ensure the website is in the best possible condition before launch.  These include reviewing technical SEO requirements such as redirect mapping, meta title, description and H1 tags that exist and are optimised.

Post-migration

Post-launch checks are carried out once the migration has been completed. These checks focus on triple-checking the state of the website immediately after launch to ensure everything has been implemented correctly.

Ensuring these tasks are completed and carried out by experienced marketers will significantly reduce any negative impact on a website's ranking following a migration.

Once the website has been successfully migrated, it’s time to celebrate and share with your customers.  However, it’s not the time to sit back and rest on our laurels.  A website is never finished, and will always benefit from functional improvements, as new business requirements or customer feedback arise.

To enable you to continue to develop and improve your new website, we offer a flexible Managed Service model that allows you to continue to build upon and enhance what has been built.

If you’d like to speak to us about migrating away from a CMS that is holding your business back, please get in touch - we’d love to hear from you!