Migrating a Large Website to WordPress: A Checklist for Agencies
Moving a five-page site to WordPress is an afternoon’s work. Moving a site with thousands of pages, a decade of blog posts, a dozen authors and solid search rankings is a different kind of project. Miss one redirect pattern and a big slice of the client’s organic traffic can disappear overnight.
The steps below apply whether the site comes from a custom CMS, Drupal, Joomla or a hosted platform.
1. Inventory everything
You can’t migrate what you haven’t found. Crawl the site and pull the XML sitemap to get every URL. List the content types (pages, posts, products, case studies, team members), the media and documents, the authors, categories, tags and other taxonomies. Note every form, integration and third-party script.
Then export traffic and backlink data from Search Console and your analytics. The pages at the top of those lists get the most care.
2. Keep, merge or drop
A migration is a good excuse to clean house. Outdated, duplicate and thin content can be merged or removed, as long as every removed URL redirects to the closest relevant page.
3. Design the content model
Decide where each old content type lives in WordPress. Standard content goes into posts and pages. Structured content like case studies or locations gets custom post types, with custom fields for the structured data. Categories, tags and filters become taxonomies.
Get this right and the site is easier to edit afterwards, and the import scripts get simpler too.
4. Map URLs and plan redirects
Build a map from every old URL to its new one. Keep URLs unchanged wherever you can. Where they change, plan 301 redirects: one-to-one rules for important pages, pattern rules for big groups like old blog URLs. Every old URL should point straight at its final destination. Redirect chains waste crawl budget and slow visitors down.
5. Script the migration
On a large site, copying and pasting is slow and full of mistakes. Use scripts or import tools that bring content across with its formatting, images and metadata, keep publication dates, authors and categories, rewrite internal links to the new URLs and carry over SEO titles and descriptions.
Run it on staging, check the output, fix the script and run it again. Expect several rounds before the result is clean.
6. Check the content
Spot-check a sample from every content type: formatting, images, embedded media, tables, internal links. On a big site, automated checks for broken links and missing images will catch what spot checks miss.
7. Test the new site
Try the forms, search and integrations. Run speed checks on the main templates. Feed a list of old URLs through the redirects and check where each one lands. And make sure the staging site is hidden from search engines. Our WordPress QA checklist covers the rest.
8. Content freeze and launch
Agree on a short content freeze, so nothing published between the final import and launch gets lost. Launch at a quiet time, with backups ready and the team on hand.
9. Watch closely after launch
For the first few weeks, check Search Console for crawl errors and 404s, compare traffic on key pages with the weeks before launch, add missing redirects as soon as they show up, and submit the new sitemap.
Running it as an agency
You can keep the strategy and the client conversations and hand the technical migration to us. Our WordPress migration service covers host-to-host moves and migrations from other platforms, under your brand.
Tell us about the site you need to move, and we will send a migration plan.
