What are some best practices for moving to a new CMS?

Key Takeaways

here's a fun question from Monty in Delhi Monty asks we are changing a fairly large HTML site to CMS that's content management system uh what are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our search rankings very good question I have seen a lot of people a lot of websites go through like a two-year redesign only to launch with a completely new software underlying package you know platform CMS underneath it and completely new HTML layout and suddenly the rankings aren't what they hoped they would be and they're stuck they're like okay was it because we changed the layout was it because we changed the CMS did we change the url structure so the one big piece of advice that I would give is try not to launch all of this at once for example if your CMS means that your layout has to change you can mock that up you know you can try to make it so you change your HTML so that it looks like it would look like from your content management system and then make sure that your rankings don't change they shouldn't change very much at all but you know if you change a whole bunch of stuff on your page that can affect how Google scores it that page so instead of you know changing the CMS and changing the layout see if you can change only one at a time try not to change the url structure another thing is you know if you're really worried you can change so that only one directory is powered by the CMS at first so it's almost like you're dipping your foot in the water uh but you know it's just like any other scientific thing if you're going to change four things at once and then your rankings change you don't know which of those four things it was so if at all possible number one try to you know change it so that everything from your CMS generates identical HTML and then number two if you are going to go through a big redesign try to put some mockups up relatively early you know you can do some AB testing see how it goes with users see how it goes in terms of search engine rankings but the main thing is don't just you know work for two years without even trying it out in search engines to see how it might be scored differently uh that said normally if you're changing things around it it isn't a huge difference it doesn't make a huge impact it is possible so do some trials if you can uh but it is should be very doable to try to migrate between different content Management Systems without losing your rankings