How to determine the scope of your website migration?

The first step in a website migration project is to gain insight in which content (e.g. webpages, media, metadata) is stored in the current content management system (CMS), such as Liferay or Hippo. When this is clear, more essential questions always arise, such as “Which content is still relevant?” and “What can be migrated and what not?”. To determine the scope of your website migration, best way is to start with making selection rules.

Selection rules

Based on an analysis of all content on the source system, it is quite easy to use the reports of this analysis to make selection rules on the current content. Selections can be made on, for example:

• Date: don’t migrate pages that haven’t been ‘touched’ the last two years
• Department: content that is owned by department X is not migrated
• Media: only migrate documents or images which are used at pages which are part of the migration scope
• Unpublished content: unpublished content is not migrated except in case of for instance seasonal content
• Versions: only migrate the last published version
• Images: do not migrate images with a resolution that does not match the new design
• Analytics: combine the reports with for instance Google Analytics and only migrate pages which have been viewed more than X times in the last X months.

It is essential to show the impact of each individual selection rule. The impact numbers are accompanied by detailed reports to give the organization the insights into the number of affected pages, media items so they can take the right decisions.

It’s advisable to first determine the selection rules on high level together with a small group of project owners. In addition, each department or organizational unit can determine their own rules, because every department has its own challenges and demands.

Impact and size of migration project

These selections give immediate insight on the impact and size of your migration. You can quickly downside the scope and make your migration project more manageable. In addition, this scope results in clear understanding of the costs, lead time and allocation of extra resources. When after the selection, it seems that 75% of all website pages can be deleted, maybe these resources can be used for adding quality to webpages instead of the actual migration.

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Using a detailed step-by-step plan, this white paper gives you guidance on how to successfully complete a migration of a web content management system.