Website content migration is the part of a platform move where the words, the images, the documents and the links travel from the old site to the new one. It looks like the easy part and it is where most of the quiet damage happens: images that did not come across, internal links still pointing at the old domain, formatting that turned into a wall of text, and the three pages nobody remembered existed. This page sets out how to move content so every page lands complete, how to check it did, and how to record who signed each page off, which is what turns the migration from a hope into a project.
Export everything, including what you think you will drop
Export the whole site from the old platform: pages, posts, images, documents, and the metadata such as titles and descriptions, which most exports leave out unless asked. Keep the export even for pages marked dropped, because a dropped page turns out to be needed more often than not. Put the export against the inventory from the migration plan so every page has a source, and note the pages whose content lives outside the platform, such as a menu in a PDF or a price list in a spreadsheet, because those are the ones that get lost.
Move it with its images, its links and its formatting
Content moves in three layers and each breaks separately. The words usually survive. The images often do not: they were hosted on the old platform's storage, and a page that still points at them looks fine until the old site is switched off. The internal links point at old addresses and need rewriting to the new ones, or they rely on the redirects for every click. Formatting such as headings, lists and tables can flatten in an export and needs restoring, because a page that lost its headings has lost part of what made it rank. Each layer is a column on the checklist.
Check each page landed, then sign it off
For every page on the map, open the new page and the old page side by side and check: the words are complete, the images show, the links go to the new site, the headings and lists are intact, the title and description carried over. Fix what did not, and record who checked the page and when. That per-page sign-off is the difference between a migration that is finished and one that is assumed to be, and it is the content record Stagenix keeps against each page in the migration plan.
Questions people ask about website content migration
Can content migration be automated?
The export and import can, and should be. The checking cannot, because the failures are visual and specific: a missing image, a flattened table, a link to the old domain. Budget a few minutes per page for a person.
Should we rewrite content during the migration?
Move first, rewrite after. Mixing the two makes it impossible to tell whether a page lost traffic because the move broke it or because the rewrite changed it.
What about documents such as PDFs?
They are pages too: they have addresses that may be linked from elsewhere and found in search. Inventory them, move them, and redirect their old addresses like any other page.