Blog

Field notes on CMS migration

Writing about replatforming without quietly losing the traffic you already had. Redirect strategy, content inventory, what actually breaks at cutover, and how answer engines find you again on the other side. Or browse by topic.

September 4, 20266 min readThe Doorman Test: Which Pages Get Into the New SiteHow to score every page migrate, rewrite, or kill before a CMS migration using four signals you can measure without building a single template.Read →
September 2, 20266 min readTriage Every Page Before You Touch a TemplateScore every page migrate, rewrite, or kill using three questions about reach, quality, and cost — before a single template gets built. A field method for pre-Read →
August 31, 20266 min readScore every page migrate, rewrite, or kill firstBefore you touch a single template, tag every page migrate, rewrite, or kill using three signals: real value, machine-readable health, and whether something aRead →
August 28, 20267 min readEmDash ships an agent that can publish to your siteCloudflare's new CMS mounts an MCP server by default, so an assistant can create and publish your content. The scopes you grant are the whole story, and so is whether your content is legible to a machine at all.Read →
August 28, 20266 min read301 Redirect Mapping: The Exit-Sign ProblemA field guide to 301 redirect mapping for a CMS replatform: what a redirect map actually is, the traps that leak traffic, and how to test before cutover.Read →
August 24, 20266 min readCMS Migration Plans: You Budgeted for the Easy HalfA CMS migration plan that is only a timeline has costed the platform and not the content. What the plan has to answer first, and the 13,838-site evidence for why.Read →
August 24, 20267 min read301 Redirects: The Field Guide You Learn the Hard WayA 301 redirect map keeps your traffic through a CMS replatform. Here are the rows every team forgets, the chains that leak signals, and how to test before cutRead →
August 21, 20267 min readDrupal to Headless: The Node IDs That Break the MoveDrupal stores relationships as numeric IDs. Headless platforms mint new ones on import. Here's how taxonomy, media, and entity references quietly break.Read →
August 19, 20267 min readContent Debt: Audit Before It Follows You OverThin, stale, and cannibalizing pages don't fix themselves in a migration — they just cost more to move. Here's how to audit content debt before cutover.Read →
August 18, 20266 min readAEO During a Replatform: Surviving the Answer BoxAI answer engines cite you by URL and cache hard. Here's how to keep Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity pointed at you after your pages move.Read →
August 17, 20266 min readBuild an Inventory That Predicts What BreaksA pre-migration content inventory only predicts cutover breakage when it records how each page is loaded — traffic, links, redirects, and dependencies, not juRead →
August 16, 20266 min readSitecore to Contentful: Move the Content, Keep the RelationshipsWhen you move from Sitecore to Contentful, the content survives the trip. The links between content are what break. Here is how to keep them intact.Read →
August 14, 20266 min readSpeeding Up AI Rediscovery After You ReplatformAI answer engines re-find your migrated site through search crawlers and indexes, not magic. Here's what actually speeds up rediscovery after a CMS move.Read →
August 12, 20266 min readWhat 'Redirects Can Wait' Actually Costs YouDeferring redirects until after a CMS migration quietly bleeds organic traffic for months. Here's why the delay compounds, and what it really costs you.Read →
August 11, 20266 min readThe pre-cutover SEO checklist that ships with the boxesCanonical tags, hreflang, and structured data are the labels crawlers read after a CMS migration. Here's how to make them survive the cutover intact.Read →
August 10, 20266 min readAEM to Headless: The Building Did Half the WorkMoving off Adobe Experience Manager to a headless CMS? Here's what maps cleanly, what you rebuild from scratch, and exactly where your search rankings leak.Read →
August 9, 20266 min readThe Attic and the Photocopier: Cleaning Before You MoveOrphaned assets and duplicate content are the two quiet killers of migration SEO. Here's how to find them before cutover, and what to do with each.Read →
August 8, 20266 min readKeeping AI Answers Pointed at You When URLs ChangeHow to keep Google AI Overviews and other answer engines citing your pages after a replatform changes your URLs, using redirects, stable facts, and crawl acceRead →
August 5, 20266 min readIt's the gift that keeps on giving the whole year, ClarkNearly half the Drupal web stops getting security patches on 9 December. Upgrading on time is what put them there.Read →
August 4, 20268 min readDrupal to headless: the reference-integrity trapsTaxonomy, media, and entity references are what break in a Drupal-to-headless migration. Here's where the links snap and how to bring the ledger with you.Read →
August 3, 20266 min readFixing Redirects After Launch Costs Six Months of TrafficDeferring redirects until after a CMS migration turns ranked URLs into 404s, strands link equity, and forces a slow recrawl. Here's the real cost and the fix.Read →
August 3, 20266 min readFour Failed Businesses, and the One I Wouldn't QuitReplatform Radar is the fifth thing I've built — the first four didn't make it. This is the unglamorous, true version of launching a product solo: the silence, the grind, the outreach that goes nowhere, and why I kept showing up.Read →
August 2, 20266 min readWordPress to a DXP: Keep Your Permalinks and Crawl BudgetMoving WordPress to a modern DXP without losing rankings comes down to three things: keep permalinks, map redirects one hop deep, and don't waste crawl budgetRead →
August 1, 20266 min readThe pre-cutover SEO checklist that survives the moveCanonical tags, hreflang, and structured data break quietly during a CMS migration. Here's how to check they survive cutover before Google notices they didn'tRead →
July 30, 20266 min readNobody sold them Drupal: the CMS quietly beating the vendors built for governmentIn US government, sites on a general-purpose open-source CMS outscore the commercial platforms sold specifically to government — and beat the average website on the open web.Read →
July 30, 20266 min readAEM to Headless: What Maps, What Rebuilds, Where Rankings LeakMoving from Adobe Experience Manager to a headless CMS? Here's what content maps cleanly, what you rebuild from scratch, and exactly where organic rankings leRead →
July 29, 20266 min readHunt Orphaned Files and Duplicates Before You MigrateOrphaned assets and duplicate content quietly bleed migration SEO. Here's how to find, score, and resolve both before cutover so rankings survive the move.Read →
July 29, 20264 min readPlatform shopping has cooled: CMS category search is down a third from its 2025 peakCombined US search volume for 15 platform-category terms — headless, composable, DXP, enterprise CMS — peaked in March 2025 and has fallen a third since.Read →
July 26, 20266 min readThe Inventory Columns That Predict Cutover BreakageA pre-migration content inventory only predicts breakage if you capture the right columns. Here are the fields, signals, and thresholds that flag failures befRead →
July 26, 20265 min readDrupal ships the web's best security defaults — and one big gapWe measured 11 signals on 27,385 live sites. Drupal leads every security default we checked — and trails badly on the one signal AI answer engines rely on.Read →
July 24, 20267 min readHow AI Answer Engines Re-Discover a Site After a ReplatformAfter a replatform, AI answer engines re-crawl on their own clock. Here's how rediscovery actually works and the concrete steps that speed it up.Read →
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, 20268 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 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 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, 20269 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, 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 →

Case studies

Real migrations with the names taken off. What broke, what worked, and what we would do differently next time.

Original research

The measurement behind the writing. Tens of thousands of live sites scanned, the data published openly, free for anyone to cite.

Want this analysis for your exact site?

Request a scan →