Content Migration Template for Product Teams

For 100-200 pages, expect 4-8 weeks from planning to go-live, plus 90 days of monitoring. The migration itself (moving content) takes 1-2 weeks. The planning, URL mapping, redirect setup, and QA take the other 3-6 weeks. Teams consistently underestimate the QA phase. Budget 30% of total migration time for verification and fixes.

Broken redirects. When old URLs return 404 instead of redirecting to new URLs, you lose accumulated search rankings, break bookmarks, and frustrate users who follow saved links. Every source URL must map to a destination URL or a relevant alternative. Never redirect deleted pages to the homepage. Redirect them to the closest relevant page.

Use a script for bulk migration and manual review for quality. Export content from the source platform (most CMS platforms have export APIs or CSV exports), transform it programmatically (rewrite URLs, convert formatting, map metadata), and import it into the destination platform. Then manually review a 10-20% sample (prioritizing high-traffic pages) to catch formatting issues the script missed.

Four rules: (1) set up 301 redirects for every changed URL before go-live, (2) keep the same domain if possible, (3) submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console on day one, and (4) monitor crawl errors and organic traffic weekly for 90 days. Most sites see a temporary 10-20% organic traffic dip in the first 2-4 weeks, recovering fully by week 8-12 if redirects are correct.

Fix redirect issues within 24 hours. Search engines crawl frequently, and every day a broken redirect persists, the longer recovery takes. For content formatting issues, prioritize fixes by page traffic. For missing content discovered by users, restore from the source platform (keep it accessible for 90 days after migration as a safety net). Log all post-migration issues in a shared document to improve the process for the next migration.