Publisher Insight
How to Inventory News Content Before a CMS Migration
Map the archive, relationships, and operational requirements before moving a newsroom website to a new platform.
Talk to SaraBiT Media
Need help choosing the right news website CMS India platform?
What should the inventory include?
List article and page types, publication dates, bylines, sections, tags, locations, images, captions, corrections, canonical URLs, redirects, and language versions. Record which fields are complete, which are duplicated, and which source system owns them.
Include functional requirements as well as content. Document forms, embeds, ad placements, analytics, newsletters, apps, ePaper, search, and third-party integrations so the migration does not preserve the archive while losing the publishing operation.
How should publishers sample and map records?
Select representative examples: recent and old stories, long-form pages, image galleries, translated articles, corrected stories, and pages with unusual embeds. Map each source field to its destination and record transformations such as taxonomy cleanup or date normalization.
Ask editors to review migrated samples in a staging environment. A technical import can succeed while captions, language links, bylines, or visible dates are still wrong. Define acceptance criteria before the full migration.
How do URL changes affect a migration?
If URLs will change, create a one-to-one map from each valuable old URL to the most relevant new page. Identify pages that should remain unchanged, pages that need a redirect, and pages that should retire with a useful replacement or status response.
Google Search Central recommends preparing URL mappings and permanent redirects for site moves that change URLs. Preserve the mapping as a project artifact and use it to update internal links and the sitemap after launch.
What should happen after the import?
Compare source and destination counts, spot-check content and metadata, crawl the new site, validate redirects, and review canonical URLs and indexing controls. Monitor important old URLs and look for broken images, missing authors, unexpected duplicates, and invalid dates.
Keep the source archive and rollback procedure available until the new site is stable. The migration is complete when the newsroom can publish normally and readers can still find the reporting they came for.
Related Publisher Solutions
Move from research into the platform area most relevant to this guide.
More Publisher Guides
Browse related content on CMS selection, launch strategy, audience growth, and publishing operations.
Ready to Launch?
Start Your News Portal
Use SaraBiT Media for a faster, more search-ready publishing stack with multilingual growth built in.