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Field notes on CMS migration

Practical writing on replatforming without losing your search and AI visibility — redirect strategy, content inventory, what breaks at cutover, and how answer engines re-find you afterwards.

July 23, 20266 min readContent Debt: Don't Migrate Thin, Stale, and Cannibal PagesContent debt is the thin, stale, and cannibalizing pages you drag into a new CMS. Here's how to find them and decide what to migrate, rewrite, or kill.Read →
July 22, 20267 min readWhen Should You Stop Fixing a CMS and Replace It?When should you replace a CMS instead of fixing it? The line I draw after years of pre-migration audits: replace when the problems are structural, not configurable — and the risk I make everyone weigh first.Read →
July 22, 20267 min readScoring Every Page: Migrate, Rewrite, or KillA practical framework for classifying pages as migrate, rewrite, or kill before your CMS migration starts — using traffic, links, freshness, and duplication dRead →
July 21, 20266 min readOrphaned Assets and Duplicate Content: Migration's Quiet KillersOrphaned assets and duplicate content rarely show up in a launch checklist, yet they quietly drain migration SEO. Here's how to find and fix both before go-liRead →
July 20, 20266 min readSitecore to Optimizely: A Pre-Go-Live Breakage AuditA pre-go-live audit for Sitecore-to-Optimizely migrations: the specific things that break in URLs, personalization, media, and templates, and how to catch theRead →
July 19, 20268 min read301 Redirect Mapping: The Replatform Lessons Teams Learn LateA practical guide to 301 redirect mapping for a CMS replatform, covering the mistakes teams discover after launch and how to catch them before traffic drops.Read →
July 19, 20267 min readThe State of CMS Migration Readiness 2026We scanned 1,205 live websites to measure what would break if they migrated CMS. WordPress and Drupal score identically — and fail in opposite directions.Read →
July 18, 20267 min readA Scoring Model for CMS Migration RiskA practical scoring model that quantifies redirect risk, duplicate content, and orphaned files so you can triage every page into migrate, rewrite, or kill befRead →
July 17, 20266 min readKeeping AI Answers Pointed at You After a ReplatformHow to preserve Answer Engine Optimization signals during a CMS migration so Google AI Overviews and LLM answer engines keep citing your pages after URLs chanRead →
July 16, 20267 min readWhat a Sitecore-to-Optimizely Migration Really BreaksA field-tested list of what actually breaks when you move from Sitecore to Optimizely, from renderings to media URLs, plus how to catch each issue before go-lRead →
July 16, 20267 min read301 Redirect Mapping for a CMS Replatform: A Field GuideA practical field guide to 301 redirect mapping for a CMS replatform: how to inventory URLs, match them by intent, avoid chains, and validate before launch.Read →
July 16, 20268 min readBuild a Pre-Migration Content Inventory That Predicts BreakageA pre-migration content inventory only predicts cutover breakage when it captures URLs, redirects, dependencies, and rankings together. Here is how to build oRead →

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Anonymized, real-world CMS→CMS migrations — what broke, what worked, and the lessons.

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