When working with content management systems (CMSs)—regardless of their size—it’s essential to plan for the future. This article will show you how to stay ready for potential content migrations to other CMSs.
Content teams and developers often find themselves limited by the rigid structures of legacy systems when they need to deliver content across multiple platforms. That’s one of the reasons why migrating from a traditional CMS to a headless CMS is becoming increasingly common, especially for organizations managing complex content needs.
This guide is for teams managing content-heavy digital experiences, and it outlines the practical steps needed to move from a traditional CMS setup to a headless one, with clarity, planning, and minimal disruption. Before we dive into the topic of CMS migration, let’s break down the main differences between the different CMS architectures.
There are many different types of CMS architectures, like the traditional CMS, decoupled CMS, hybrid CMS, or the headless CMS. Today, however, we will focus on differentiating between the traditional and headless CMS.
In a traditional CMS, often referred to as a monolith CMS, the back end and front end are closely tied together. The structure typically allows content to be created and displayed only within predefined templates, usually on a single website.
This tight coupling limits flexibility and makes it difficult to reuse content across different platforms. While this setup works for straightforward publishing needs, it often becomes restrictive when an organization wants to expand to mobile apps, smart devices, or other digital channels.
In a headless CMS, content is managed independently from its presentation layer and delivered through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). This allows it to work across websites, mobile apps, and other digital platforms without requiring duplicate effort. Because of this architecture, it’s more scalable and better suited for growing digital ecosystems.
Overall, the type of CMS you choose will depend on your specific needs and requirements. Each type of CMS has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the right choice for your project will depend on factors such as your technical expertise, the complexity of your project, and your budget.
In my experience, enterprise clients who wanted to grow and needed to scale their content operations always relied heavily on a headless approach as it proved to be the only one that was future-proof, flexible, headache-free and formed an essential part of their composable views allowing them to use the solution products that delivered to their requirements.
Now that we have both the traditional and the headless CMS explained, let’s take a look at some of the main reasons why you might want to consider migrating to a headless CMS.
While every organization should evaluate which type of CMS best fits their needs, many choose to move to a headless setup, especially those with complex content needs. There are many benefits of the headless CMS, and the ability to support omnichannel content, scale content operations, and gain more development flexibility are some of the common reasons for the shift. Let’s now take a look at these and other reasons a bit deeper.
A headless CMS helps the content team work more efficiently while supporting multiple devices and platforms. Thanks to the headless architecture, content can be created once and reused anywhere—across web, mobile, in-app experiences, and many other touchpoints. This flexibility simplifies delivery to current platforms and also sets your team up for what comes next. This means that from a long-term perspective, headless platforms are more adaptable. As new digital channels emerge, your content is already structured and ready to be delivered wherever it’s needed.
A headless CMS also gives development teams control over how content is presented. Because the content layer is decoupled from the front end, developers aren’t tied to specific templates, which gives them the freedom to use modern frameworks and tools. This means that they can build faster websites that perform better using the frameworks they prefer, without being limited by a built-in theme system.
Lastly, in a traditional CMS, everything is part of one system, both the content and how it’s shown to users. This means that if someone breaks into one part, they can often reach the other. A headless CMS, on the other hand, keeps the two layers separate, making it harder for attackers to get in and giving organizations more control over who can access what.
Interactive guide to a smooth content migrationPlanning a content migration to Kontent.ai? Or interested in what goes into a successful content migration? This guide is here to help you every step of the way. Check out our Interactive guide to a smooth content migration.
Content migration from a monolith CMS to a headless CMS can be a complex process, depending on the amount and complexity of your content. One of the core steps in the migration process is planning.
Before starting the migration, it is important to plan out the process and identify any potential challenges or obstacles. This may include identifying the content that needs to be migrated, determining the format and structure of the content, stakeholder alignment, and setting up a schedule for the migration. Here are a few important stages teams might want to consider before the migration itself.
Define your goals and expected outcomes
What are the pain points in your organization’s current system? Are you trying to speed up content delivery, support omnichannel experiences, or simplify workflows? Careful planning and preparation needs to take place to articulate what methods and tools are available to help with this process. There are also other important factors to consider like time, budget, and resource availability.
Identify and align all key stakeholders
Migration affects more than just developers. Bring in content creators, project managers, and SEO specialists early on. Include representatives from legal, localization, and marketing teams if your content spans multiple regions or has compliance requirements. Getting early input from each group helps avoid miscommunication, unexpected delays, or duplicated efforts.
Inventory your content assets
You will need to identify the content you want to migrate—this may include pages, posts, images, videos, and other types of content. Placing the different types of content into categories and having some form of organized architecture will help with the process. Also, an up-to-date IA (Information Architecture) can help to list out the pages of content that need to be considered for migration or the pages that do not.
Decide what to migrate, update, or retire
It’s important to understand that there is no magic lift and shift functionality when it comes to process, everything needs to be looked at. Key decisions would need to be made on what content is kept and what content is no longer needed or could be created again in the new CMS.
As each content migration has its differences, an example of such category grouping that could be used to segregate content could look like this:
Outline system dependencies and integration needs
It’s important to perform due diligence on different types of third-party vendors you will need to consider when using the new CMS. You may need to set up subscription plans and recruit the right resources and skills for the different integrations. Thinking about how this will be set up in the new CMS and how everything will work together will be important in the planning process.
Create a detailed project roadmap
A strong migration strategy should include key milestones such as content audits, technical setup, and migration testing. Building a clear timeline helps prevent delays and makes the CMS migration process more manageable and predictable. It’s also helpful to identify potential blockers early and build in buffer time to accommodate unexpected issues.
When starting your headless CMS evaluation, think about both the technical capabilities and the needs of your content team. A good CMS should be easy for editors to use and flexible enough for developers to build on. Robust API support is essential so your content can be delivered reliably across platforms. It should also integrate well with your existing tech stack, whether that includes CRMs, analytics, or custom apps.
Don’t forget to assess how the CMS handles localization, user roles, and publishing workflows, as these are key CMS requirements if you’re working across regions or teams. Finally, look for a solution that can scale with you and won’t become a barrier as your needs grow.
In a nutshell, here is a checklist of things to think about during your headless CMS evaluation:
Before starting the migration itself, it pays off to invest some time in organizing the content so it works well in a headless setup. Here are a few areas worth focusing on while preparing:
Build a structured, reusable content model
Instead of migrating content as large, unstructured blobs, break it down into consistent fields like title, summary, body, and image. This kind of structured content makes it easier to reuse elements across channels and adapt them for future needs. In addition, try avoiding embedded styling or layout decisions inside your content, as headless systems focus on clean, presentation-free content.
Remove outdated or duplicated content
The next step is to review your existing content and remove anything that’s no longer relevant or has been repeated across pages. Migrating old or unnecessary material adds extra work and can clutter your new CMS. Focus on keeping what’s current, useful, and aligns with your new content strategy.
Prepare media assets with clean metadata
Good asset preparation involves using clear naming conventions, applying tags, and checking that media files meet basic quality and format standards. If assets were previously stored without proper metadata, now is the time to clean them up. This will save time later and help your team find what they need quickly.
Set up redirects to preserve existing URLs
Migrating to a new CMS often means changing your URL structure. To protect your SEO rankings and avoid broken links, plan your redirects in advance. You can start by listing all existing URLs and mapping each one to its new destination in your headless CMS.
Now that we talked about how you can prepare for the migration itself, let’s investigate things that you would need to consider regarding exporting content from the existing CMS in our next step.
Exporting content from a monolithic CMS typically involves writing scripts or code that interact with the CMS’s database and API to retrieve the desired content and format it for export. The specifics of the process will depend on the CMS being used and the desired format of the exported content.
It is important to verify that you have the necessary permissions and access to export the content and ensure a backup of the content is completed before changes and the content transfer begin.
CMS export tools
Most CMSs provide tools for exporting content, such as XML or CSV exports. You can use these tools to export the content you have identified for data migration. The best thing to do in this situation is to identify what the CMS provides. Once you know this, you can then define a strategy to export the content. Exporting the content from the monolith CMS can vary depending on the tools available from the existing CMS, and the content complexities and categorizations of content available. Also, it can all depend on how the content is structured within the existing CMS.
One thing I’ve learned over time is that having an export feature doesn’t automatically mean everything is okay; it’s more what the export does and then how you can use it that matters more. For instance, I once came across an image export feature, but instead of exporting the CMS image, which was not in a DAM, it provided a reference identifier and other information for it, which is not exactly what I required.
Custom export scripts
If the monolith CMS doesn’t provide the necessary tools to assist with exporting, you may need to write custom scripts to help with this process. Use the planning phase to help provide what content segments to target and which ones could be achieved more quickly, either manually or using some form of scraping mechanism. The quantity of data or content would dictate the approach you will need to go for, so the more content there is, the more a scripted export feature is required.
Content lockdown
Content with the monolith CMS may still be edited by the existing team so you may need to consider if there is a content lockdown or investigate the last modified date or even the ability to export changes and factor this into your solution when gathering the exported content.
Once you have export processes in place and content is successfully stored somewhere, there will be no doubt that you will need to cleanse and/or adjust and rectify this content data to suit a successful content import process. Let’s investigate the next step in this journey after you have exported data.
Once you have exported the content from the monolith CMS, the data content could be in various formats, depending on the export solutions that may have been used. You will need to clean and prepare it for import into the headless CMS. This may include removing any duplicates, fixing any formatting issues, and ensuring that the content is in a format that can be easily imported into the headless CMS, and overall, mapping your legacy content to your new structure so that the content fits the new model and can be reused more effectively across channels.
Image considerations
You may find that some images may not be optimized and may not be of the best quality, and, in some cases, you must decide if you wish to consider them to be imported into the new CMS. In those situations, it’s worth having some basic image requirements to help you filter out the good from the bad.
Incorporating naming conventions for images and documents will always help, as you don’t want to bring bad asset naming habits into the new CMS! Any revisions and duplications would need to be removed to avoid clutter in the new CMS.
Simplifying your content repository with naming conventionsConsistent, descriptive naming makes it easy for you and your team to understand what a content item contains. Read more about it in our blog post on naming conventions that work.
Simplifying rich text content
It’s important to realize, and sometimes people forget this, that the monolith and headless CMSs are not a like-for-like, and you can’t just lift and shift content without running into issues. One of the reasons is that each CMS would have its own rules and requirements to follow. An example of this could be simply down to the type of rich text editor they use, and if the content that you wish to import has forbidden elements within it, it could cause the CMS to not take in the value during the import process, therefore, causing errors and delays to the import process.
Another important aspect of headless CMS is that their focus is to allow for content to be served to multiple channels, and for this criterion, you would need to avoid any markup, styling, and presentation specifics, as they would get stripped out. If everything is within a big, rich text field with lots of styling and nested components, then it will be tricky to dissect this and get it to the format in the new CMS. My recommendation is that when working with rich text elements, it’s safer to go minimalistic and remove any unwanted and unrecognized tags that are not allowed before importing the content into the new CMS.
Formats of data fields
You may also need to look at the format of the different data fields from the new CMS and map them via transformation scripts to meet the new requirements. There could be instances where the text, date, and number fields could be in slightly different data formats, and this can cause a lot of pain if it is not sorted out before the import process.
Script tags in content
Often, monolith CMSs allow the capability to include script tags and allow for scripts to be used. This would be another aspect to plan to remove anything that might disrupt or cause the import process to fail for the new CMS.
Finally, you need to import the content into the headless CMS. Most headless CMSs provide tools for importing content, such as APIs or CSV imports. You can use these tools to import the content into the headless CMS and make it available for use in your applications.
Importing content into a headless CMS example
If you can map the content correctly for the new CMS, then there are potentially a few ways to import the content into a headless CMS like Kontent.ai.
You can also check out my blog post Adventures in Content Migration, which talks about the pros and cons of a situation I had to deal with in the past. You may select a different option from what I went with, depending on your needs.
Import tool options within a headless CMS
Depending on the headless CMS you are using, there may be tools already out there which would allow for content importing, whether that is through CLI (Command Line Interface) or a bulk import tool, if the mapping of structured content types works using this approach, then you are on to a winner. If not, then there will be plenty of ways to use the headless CMS APIs to create an import process.
Enforce reusability
When looking to import content, it is important to avoid duplication and try to enforce reusability where possible, especially if you want to take advantage of using a headless CMS.
There also could be a mapping exercise that goes through the content that has been cleaned and map it correctly to the type it needs to go into for the new CMS. Content will need to be in a structured format if you want to avoid starting over again.
Look into the headless CMS APIs when importing images and documents
When it comes to importing images and documents, it’s essential to investigate any APIs that the new CMS provides. Headless CMSs generally have an API you can use to perform the import process for assets, so it would be worth looking into this. Whatever you do when importing assets, it’s vital to set up some form of organization with the CMS asset/document library to keep things neat, tidy, and easy to find within it. One of the worst things to find when using a new CMS is that all the imported assets are sitting in a single folder.
Testing your import process
Having some form of ability to perform an import process on a testing environment in the new CMS would be highly recommended, as speaking from experience, the import process never works the first time around and you are bound to get teething issues where tweaks would need to be made.
The ability to perform an update to imported content is always highly beneficial, too, as you don’t want to be waiting for long imports, especially for small changes. When doing this, it’s highly recommended to perform such operations with clear error messaging and error handling to ensure the import process doesn’t disrupt other functionality or break halfway through, but instead allows you to quickly resolve issues, allowing you to reimport items that had failed. Having a batched approach with clearly visible status updates to see progress is recommended, too.
Content that can’t be imported
There will be content that either can’t be imported or needs further action. This type of content can range from forms, custom tables data, personalization, and/or content that is imported from elsewhere.
This type of content would need to be categorized in the planning and research stage, and then managed with a plan of execution.
An example of this could be personalized content. Dealing with this requires incorporating the researched and agreed-upon third-party vendor to perform personalization within the new CMS, based on an established content strategy. The same would be the case for forms and capturing form data.
Another area of this type of data is content that was imported from an external source in the monolith CMS, this would also need to be configured into the new CMS as well.
Manual content
Using automation where possible will save you valuable time, but even with all the planning and automation that you have in place, you will find a group of content that will need to be entered manually. It’s essential to have a contingency plan for this situation, including potential solutions to speed up this process and try to avoid as much manual content entry as possible. When doing this, you would need to categorize the manual content into groups.
Depending on the quantity and complexity of the groups, I would recommend building a simple capture form to collate content from the content entry team so that a tool could be built to import the content into the complex structures of the target CMS. The reason for this is that the content entry team might not be too worried at the early stages about how it is configured in the new CMS and is more concerned about getting the data into the CMS in the first instance.
Examples of such data collection techniques can range from adding data into CSVs, spreadsheets, documents, and easy-to-use custom forms. Once you have this data, you can then import it into the new CMS by creating custom CMS API scripts, therefore avoiding manual content entry into the CMS, especially for more complex situations.
Once your content is ready, the next step is to build and test the front end of your site or app. Start by connecting the CMS to your front-end framework, and start pulling in content using the CMS APIs. This is where the flexibility of a headless CMS really pays off, as you’re free to build exactly what you need without being restricted by built-in templates.
After the connection is in place, thoroughly test how everything works across devices, use cases, and workflows. That means checking content on desktops, tablets, and phones, making sure various content types display correctly, and confirming that content editors can preview and publish as expected. Careful testing at this stage reduces the risk of problems after your CMS migration and helps deliver a consistent user experience from day one.
Once the migration is complete, the work isn’t over. A smooth CMS go-live depends on catching any lingering issues early and making sure your team is ready to work in the new environment. Use this migration validation checklist to guide your final round of checks and adjustments:
It’s important to plan for Search Engine Optimization from the start to protect your rankings and visibility. To support headless SEO, make sure search engines can crawl and index your content properly. This often means using server-side rendering (SSR) or prerendering, since content delivered purely through JavaScript may not be visible to crawlers.
Add essential metadata, including structured data, title tags, and up-to-date sitemaps to help search engines understand what your content is about. Keep your URLs clean and consistent, and redirect any legacy URLs to avoid broken links. After launch, track your site’s performance in search to spot any issues with content discoverability and address them quickly.
Many CMS migration challenges begin with underestimating the complexity of your content. To prevent unexpected hurdles, start with a thorough content audit and mapping, so you know exactly what you’re working with. Another critical migration risk is losing SEO equity due to poor redirect planning. Protect your search rankings by preparing a detailed URL map and setting up proper redirects to avoid broken links.
CMS integration difficulties with existing systems can also arise. To prevent this, collaborate with technical teams early on to plan and test connections with CRMs, analytics, or other tools to avoid surprises later. Unpleasant surprises can also stem from the lack of testing before go-live. Rushing into launch without thorough testing of content imports, workflows, and user permissions puts the entire project at risk. To avoid this, allocate enough time for multiple rounds of testing in a staging environment and address issues before the public release.
Finally, team alignment is equally important. Misaligned expectations or unclear roles can slow down progress, so make sure responsibilities are clearly defined and communication stays open throughout the project. To minimize friction for editors adapting to new tools, ensure your organization provides comprehensive training, documentation, and ongoing support to embrace the new system and work efficiently from day one.
To see what a successful migration looks like in action, let’s look at a CMS case study of Knab bank, a modern Dutch financial institution, that decided to move from Sitecore to Kontent.ai. Their goal was to empower their teams across the organization, from service desk staff to marketers, to move faster, collaborate better, and deliver great customer experiences with ease.
Before the Kontent.ai migration, Knab faced a mix of challenges: limited independence for content teams, slow site performance, and the inability to preview content before publishing. Their existing setup made scaling difficult and content creation slow and often frustrating.
With Kontent.ai, Knab adopted a headless approach that prioritized flexibility and usability. Visual editing brought preview capabilities to the authoring experience, and intuitive content workflows gave teams more autonomy while improving governance. In addition, features like collections and granular user roles helped simplify content reuse and collaboration across departments.
Thanks to the flexible yet powerful capabilities of Kontent.ai, we have advanced to the next level of digital maturity. We have reduced our reliance on external platforms, resulting in substantial cost savings.
Daniel Abrahamse
Product Owner, Digital Channels, Knab
As a result, Knab has enhanced their control over content creation and achieved easier content reuse; the teams can now create content much faster and independently, and the flexibility has improved significantly for content permissions and user roles. If you want to go into more detail, read the full Knab success story or watch our on-demand webinar on how they made the switch.
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