The day a city launches a new website, its old addresses don’t disappear. They’re printed on utility bills, bookmarked by residents, linked from the county’s site and indexed by search engines. If they break, people land on error pages — and calls go up.
A careful migration keeps every one of them working. Here is the process we follow, whatever platform you’re leaving.
1. Inventory everything
Crawl the current site and list every page, document and image, along with its address. Add the addresses in your sitemap and the most-visited pages from your analytics. Expect more PDFs than you think.
2. Decide what moves
Not everything should. Sort the inventory into: move as is, rewrite, merge, archive, and delete. Old news can be archived; outdated forms should be replaced, not copied.
3. Map old addresses to new ones
Every old address gets a new home — a page, a document, or the closest useful page if the content is gone. This map becomes your redirects.
4. Use permanent redirects
A 301 (permanent) redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page has moved for good. Search engines generally transfer a page’s standing to its new address when they see one; Google describes this in its guide to site moves with URL changes.
5. Fix accessibility on the way in
A migration is the cheapest time to fix problems: add missing alt text, convert busy PDFs to pages, repair heading order. Copying problems into a new system means paying for them twice.
6. Launch, then watch
After launch, watch your “page not found” log for a few weeks. Each broken link people hit is either a missing redirect or a sign that something important was left behind.
How Sentra CMS helps
The Sentra CMS migration engine crawls your current site — it recognizes common platforms including CivicPlus, Granicus, Revize, WordPress and Wix — builds a migration plan you can edit, imports pages as drafts, checks every document, suggests alt text for images, and creates a redirect for every old address. After launch, broken links people hit appear in a report with a one-click fix.