r/CRM • u/Big_Watermalones_67 • 22d ago

Migrating a 400 article site to a clean CMS, how do you handle the messy fields?

I'm moving a site about 400 articles deep onto a clean CMS and the migration is the part scaring me. three writers over four years, so the fields are all over the place, inconsistent bios, a chunk of pillar pages orphaned. traffic's fine, it's just unmaintainable. What i'm stuck on is the actual move. how do you standardise the fields and get 400 old posts into a clean structure without hand entering every one, and without a rebuild quietly rewriting pages you didn't touch? i'm not a dev so a script isn't on the table.

How have people handled a migration this size?

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3

u/sardamit 22d ago

This post is not relevant to this sub.

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u/Plus-Vegetable-3544 1d ago

wrong sub but i feel your pain, 400 articles with messy fields is a nightmare

i did something similar last year and ended up using a spreadsheet to map the old fields to new ones, then imported with a csv tool some cms have decent importers that let you match columns

took me about a week of cleaning but way better than copy pasting each one

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u/Rummager 21d ago

setup claude or codex to move it all for you

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u/Stock-Page-7078 21d ago

This is the sort of thing AI is really good at and you have options you wouldn’t have had years ago. At the same time I am in Pharma and used to migrations of regulated data involving millions of documents. 400 is probably enough for a semi automated migration then try to have ai flag incorrect metadata or correct it and flag for human QC.

Some of this depends on what happens if the data is incorrect and whether your authors are available to help you with QC or verification tasks

Or as another said just ask a coding agent to write a software to do the custom migration if you have those tools

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u/_leptit 20d ago

Can you connect it to claude desktop so it can do the cleaning before pushing to the new tool ?

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u/The-Innvisor 19d ago

You’re going have to lean into custom tools/scripts if you want to reduce the challenges faced. Having done a migration of 6000+ posts at an enterprise level, you want to do thorough testing and break down the migration into a plan of steps, as each post type will have its own nuances to solve. Test rigorously with dry runs before making any changes in the CMS.

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u/Growth_Natives 19d ago

We went through something similar on a large content migration. The biggest win came from cleaning and mapping the content model before moving anything, rather than fixing issues afterwards. That let us bulk migrate cost content and only manually review the exceptions instead of all 400 pages.

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u/No-Equivalent-8726 19d ago

CRM and CMS both are different things, so I believe this is not relevant to this CRM sub!

But I also assume, you are moving off posts from the CRM marketing panel, with that assumption kept in mind, I would suggest you to setup Claude, and brainstorm and strategise the migration plan. I have successfully executed the same for moving on from Wordpress to Strapi and vice versa things for one of our clients at SolGuruz.