By Rihana Ries
Migrating to a new content management system can be one of the most significant – and complex – digital transformation projects for an enterprise. In 2025, organisations face growing pressure to modernise their platforms, improve authoring experiences, and future-proof their digital presence. Yet many CMS migrations stall or fail due to poor planning, lack of automation, and underestimating the scale of the project.
This guide walks you through what you need to know about CMS migration in 2025, from common pitfalls to strategies that work.
Why CMS migrations fail
Many businesses underestimate the complexity of moving from legacy platforms to modern digital experience platforms (DXPs). Common pitfalls include:
- Underestimating content complexity. Migrating thousands of pages, assets, and data relationships is not a copy-paste exercise.
- Inconsistent content structures. Legacy CMS platforms often allow inconsistent tagging, metadata, and formatting to accumulate over time.
- Custom components and templates. Business-critical components may need to be rebuilt or mapped into the new system.
- Manual QA bottlenecks. Human-driven migration processes lead to errors, rework, and extended timelines.
The 2025 CMS migration checklist
A modern migration requires a structured approach. Here is a checklist for success:
1. Audit your existing CMS
- Identify all content types, assets, and integrations.
- Flag duplicate or outdated content.
2. Define your target CMS goals
- Improve editor experience, speed, or scalability.
- Align migration goals with business outcomes.
3. Map content models
- Translate legacy structures into your new CMS or DXP schema.
- Account for headless and multi-channel delivery.
4. Choose the right migration tooling
- Manual migrations are error-prone and expensive.
- AI-powered migration platforms can reduce time and risk.
5. Run test migrations
- Select representative content sets for early testing.
- Validate mappings and adjust where needed.
6. Automate quality assurance
- Use automated checks for missing links, images, or metadata.
- Build regression testing into the workflow.
How AI is changing CMS migration
In 2025, AI plays a growing role in content migration:
- Automated content mapping. AI can match legacy components to new CMS components, reducing manual configuration.
- Error reduction. Machine learning helps detect anomalies, broken links, or missing metadata before they become problems.
- Scalability. Enterprises migrating hundreds of sites or brands can automate repetitive processes that would otherwise require significant manual effort.
- Continuous improvement. AI learns from previous migrations, improving accuracy over time.
This is where Migration Accelerator comes in – an AI-powered migration platform designed for enterprise-scale CMS projects.
Budgeting for CMS migration in 2025
Migration costs vary widely depending on:
- Number of pages and assets
- Complexity of content models
- Manual versus automated migration methods
- Multi-site or multi-brand rollouts
Factor in long-term cost savings when evaluating automation versus manual migration. An automated migration can reduce both time-to-launch and ongoing support costs.
Moving forward
CMS migration does not need to be a high-risk, multi-year project. By using modern best practices and AI-powered tooling, enterprises can shorten timelines, reduce errors, and focus on delivering better digital experiences.
If you are planning a CMS migration in 2025, tools like Migration Accelerator offer a reliable path forward – bridging legacy systems and modern DXPs with speed and accuracy.
