Prepare your existing content

Jan Cerman

2 minutes

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Does your existing content spark joy? A content audit can give you hints. Let’s do an audit exercise to identify your important content and flag what’s unnecessary. Once you know which is which, you can omit the unnecessary parts and export only what’s useful.

Audit your content

Before you start with the migration, involve your business stakeholders. They need to take a long hard look at the existing content and consider how much of it is worth keeping. This is the goal of a pre-migration content audit. Content audit is a prerequisite for any migration between different systems. While the content audit can make the overall migration process longer, you’re switching systems to improve things, and that must include your content as well.

Content audit 101

If this is your first time doing a content audit, here are a few pointers to help you get started.

Begin with your customer journey. Identify relevant content and content channels. What do people want to accomplish as they interact with your content?
Check your web analytics to find your top types of content.
Not all content is created equal. You don’t need to keep all of it.

Mark content worth keeping

Focus on identifying and tagging the following:

Core content. Identify critical content necessary for achieving your business goals.
Shared content. Identify content (to be) used across different brands, sites, and channels.
ROT. Redundant, obsolete, or trivial content. Flag such content as "do not export" to reduce content debt and bloat in the new CMS.
Content that doesn’t make sense in a headless CMS. Not all entities are suitable for a headless CMS. For example, metadata describing how to display or visualize your content. Flag such content as "do not export".

You want to migrate the core and shared content and skip any content ROT and content that doesn’t make sense in a headless CMS.

Export audited content to an iterable format

When you’ve identified the content you want to migrate, you need to export it from your current system into a computer-friendly format such as JSON.We recommend exporting your audited content to separate files. For example, you can put core content in one file and shared content in another. You can also export each type of content, such as all blog posts, to a separate file. This is up to you and depends on how you want to structure your migration.The migration to Kontent.ai relies on writing custom migration scripts that transform the exported content from its original structure into the new structure in your Kontent.ai project.

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