CMS (Content Management System) – content management system or software for creating, editing, organizing the structure and content management.
Moving a site to a new engine is a long and laborious process that allows you to fix the shortcomings of SEO promotion and conduct a technical audit of the website.
Among the most common are:
Each CMS has its own specific features (layout, database structure, etc.).
The complexity of moving a website to another engine can be compared with the development of a new web service.
Therefore, it is so important to determine the requirements for the system and select those that maximally correspond to the desired functionality.
Below are the CMS platforms we recommend for each type of website:
At ITForce, roughly 70% of development projects run on WordPress with a custom architecture or as a headless solution built on Next.js. WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world: according to W3Techs, it powers 40.1% of all websites and 58.6% of websites whose CMS is known (October 2026).
*make sure you have a backup your website. Only after this step can you start moving the old project to a new site. And run the test until you find but fix the errors found.
Each CMS forms semantic (human-readable) URLs in its own way.
The URLs will change when you move the project to a new engine. Also, URLs will change if you modify the structure of the resource. This can lead to a loss of traffic. Therefore, it is necessary to configure page 301 redirects. However, if the project contains more than 100 pages, then working with a redirect becomes very time-consuming.
1. Redirects
We put redirects manually for small websites. For large projects, you can use:
Google.Analytics
Netpeak Spider
Screeming Frog
Further:
And when the list of all the website pages is ready, create a table of correspondence of old and new URLs.
*make sure that the pages that generate the most traffic generated on the test platform.
The final step – 301 redirects in the htaccess file.
2. Content.
Move all the texts. If the project contains a large number of pages, then the work on the materials transfer should be entrusted to programmers. You can manually enter data such as "Shipping and payment", "About the company", "Contacts", etc.
3. Metadata and Headers
Title, description and H1 must also be moved over.
4. File robots.txt.
Create a robots.txt file for the new engine.
5. File sitemap.xml.
It is necessary to generate a new site map file and submit it in Google Search Console. Search engines should index new pages of a website as soon as possible.
6. Systems of analytics and other external services.
Remember to set up goals, e-commerce and other parameters where URL change could be involved.
7. 404 error pages.
It is necessary to check the correctness of the display. The error should be displayed on all erroneous URLs and report that such a page does not exist.
It’s good if the page with the 404 error contains links to the main page of the website.
8. rel = "canonical" tag
Set rel = "canonical" tag to eliminate duplicate pagination pages.
9. Mobile devices
Check the mobile version in PageSpeed Insights or in Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools: Google retired its standalone Mobile-Friendly Test in December 2023.
10. Backlinks.
Extract all backlinks from Ahrefs and check if all pages that donor’s link to give a 200 response code.
If there are pages with 404 server responses, then redirect to the appropriate site URL or to the main page.
11. Notification of changes in the URL of all specialists working with it (PPC, SMM).
It is necessary so that there are no ridiculous situations with errors on clicks from social networks.
You should write down the desired technical and functional requirements for the system before deciding to move to a new CMS.
Back up the project.
You can transfer a website without a significant drop in traffic and losses during search promotion based on the above algorithm for moving a web project to another CMS.
A decline in traffic is possible for the first time after the move. Relax, this is normal. In a month or two, the work would come right. And if you have foreseen everything, then the effectiveness of the project at the new site will become higher.
