Wildebeest Migration
Wildebeest Migration© Chirdeep Shetty

Migrating Your Website to the Quintype CMS

The simplest part of running a successful website is building it. Once a website is built, content becomes important. Once you have a good amount of content, your audience becomes the highest priority. Then, you need to analyse usage patterns, user behaviors, and how to target and acquire more readers and customers.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, the initial website becomes inadequate. Or, you may come across a new platform that can address these inadequacies, and you feel the need to switch. But what about your hard-earned audience? What about the thousands of stories, their SEO juice, and page ranks?

Will there be a significant downtime when the website switch happen? What happens to all the internal links?

At Quintype, we get to answer these questions frequently.

Yes, all your stories will be migrated. Yes, SEO juice and page rank will be properly translated. No, we will not have a significant downtime. Mostly zero.

Quintype

A high percentage of our clients at Quintype have migrated to our platform from a wide variety of tech stacks. Our history of migrations range from custom CMS’ with tens of thousands of stories to WordPress blogs with stories counting just over 50.

Yes, migrations are fraught with risks. A successful migration is about making the process as solid, strong, and fool-proof as practically possible.

Analysis

At Quintype, our migration processes start with the client sharing the knowledge base of the source website. The technologies used and practices followed are analysed and the target website design is finalized. This is followed by an agreed upon roadmap from start to release.

To make this process traceable and to guarantee a successful migration, Quintype has introduced a Migrator toolkit for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. The toolkit can help analyse the source website and create reports around the source URL structures, number of posts, authors, categories, tags, and so on. This in itself becomes a life-saver for larger websites, where manual checking of thousands of stories is a tough ask.

While migrating a website with content spanning across a few years, the older the story, the higher the chances of having missing resources. Images may be linked incorrectly or the provider themselves may have shut shop. These problems will never come up on the old website as the chances of auditing your own website, for no apparent reason, are low.

Quality Control

Ensuring a smooth release commences on the engineer's machine, where Quintype Quality Assurance Engineers take a long, hard look at the content and compare it to the source. Once approved, the migrated website is set up on our staging environment where the client can play around with the content, compare it to the original website, and then sign off. This ensures that there are no surprises when the content is migrated to the production environment. Regular sign-offs from our well-experienced QA engineers to account managers as well as the client's own QA team ensures that the final outcome is predictable, on-time, and perfect.

Risks

No migration can be a 100% clone of the source with so many moving parts involved in the process. Unsupported content types, surprisingly named files, hacks set up by websites on top of standard platforms, two different plug-ins that do not play well with migrations, etc can throw the process off.

Communication is the key during this process. Keeping the client updated about hurdles can go a long way in ensuring the success of the migration. A successful migration is one where both the parties are happy with the final outcome.

The Quintype Migration

Migrating Taxonomies

  • Categories & Subcategories to Sections & Sub-Sections
  • Tags

Migrating Authors (will not be able to login with old credentials)

  • Author Names, Author Emails etc

Migrating Content

  • Stories in their entirety
  • Converting source format to Quintype-supported Story Elements
  • Passing the story through the Workflow and validations
  • Associate Stories to Authors and Taxonomies
  • Social Embeds like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.

Migrating Menu & Other Navigation Options

  • Create Menus, Sub-menus, etc.

Migrating the Users (will not be able to login with old credentials)

Training the old system users to start creating content in the new workspace

  • Familiarisation with newer terminologies and workflows

Moving Instant Article Feeds

  • RSS URL in Facebook needs to be updated.

Migrating the SEO

  • Title, description and alt tags (images) needs to be updated for the new stories
  • Schema, OG tags and Twitter Cards are automated

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