Many South Australian public sector organisations are replacing ageing or expensive content management systems. A CMS migration is a chance to cut costs and improve the user experience, but it also carries the risk of broken links, lost search rankings and accessibility regressions.
Before you migrate
- Inventory every page, document and URL, including PDFs and forms. Forms that take personal information or payments need extra care; see online forms and payments for SA councils.
- Record baseline analytics, search rankings and accessibility audit results.
- Agree on content owners and archive what is no longer needed.
During the build
- Map every old URL to a new one and plan 301 redirects.
- Rebuild templates to WCAG 2.2 AA and test with assistive technologies.
- Preserve page titles, meta descriptions and structured data.
- Set up separate environments with change control for UAT and production, and plan UAT with real scenarios and safe test data (see software testing and UAT for SA projects).
At launch and after
- Run a link check and an accessibility scan before cut-over.
- Submit the new XML sitemap to search engines.
- Monitor 404 errors and search performance for at least 90 days.
- Keep a rollback plan ready.
See our website design and development service.