Website Migration & Restructure

The majority of organisations manage their business website with a CMS (Content Management System), which allows the website owner to carry out limited structural and content changes within the relative safety of a purpose-built framework. It often follows that as a business grows it needs to augment its online presence. This might mean migrating the existing website to a new platform, or it could mean the adoption of a new bespoke CMS. Migrating and restructuring can be an unpredictable process and its challenges need to be considered and planned for ahead of any transfer of digital assets.

As with any type of relocation, it's not uncommon for assets to go missing. With so many different file systems, or alternative locations, locating lost or misplaced assets will require additional, unplanned resourcing to repair or replace them.

The restructuring of any organisation or service is rarely straightforward. Resources and assets often undergo critical analysis and changes are inevitable. Technical capacity usually expands along with the business and in the context of website restructuring, meeting deadlines can be a real concern. Both static and dynamic pages can be complex, requiring special methods of restructuring to execute the transition with minimum disruption or detriment to the business.

Metadata, or data about data, can be responsible for carrying ranking information that help search bots. Because it can be generated in various ways and is usually found on every page of content, metadata needs to be handled with great care. This is especially so when it comes to migrating an account or restructuring a website with an existing large footprint.

To ensure that the new site functions as planned, the internal site links that exist between digital assets require a two-stage process to effect successful migration and restructuring. The complexity of this aspect of the process involves capturing all the old locations from the existing site in order to protect their integrity. Since the new CMS will assign asset links that are unlike the old ones, old pages and content will need to be revisited and updated to use the new links.

There are two recognised ways to manage this process: manual migration; and the development of custom-built scripts. The former is labour intensive since each set of data needs to be copied manually and saved to the new CMS and for large scale sites this can prove to be an inefficient use of resources.

The development of scripts specifically designed to enable as efficient a migration as possible is seen as a better option. These scripts attempt to extract all the data assets and transform them into the new CMS format, restructuring as needed. Additionally, trial migrations are recommended, during which it would be best practice to prohibit content updates.

Ultimately, deciding which migration and restructuring methods to adopt requires careful planning, asset mapping and the assistance of specialists in the field to ensure the migration is a success.