CMS and Data MigrationWhen the client called about this project, I couldn’t have been more excited to collaborate. Over the years,  the move to one CMS for Inc. and FastCompany had been a dream of mine and others. The company’s move to one CMS would allow the organization to effectively and efficiently scale publishing processes and tooling, advertising deliverability, and always-evolving user-experience requirements, while no longer needing to support and maintain two different systems. Truly a win-win, and one I was proud to support.

Any system migration can be a challenge. The added complexity for migrating Inc. came from a “Frankenstein-ing” of the previous CMS: think finding a door inside a wall, that lead to some stairs, to another door, during a home renovation, but without documentation of how the original house was built. 

To manage this complexity, these were the core areas of focus:

  • Audit old CMS taxonomy to define migration logic to the new CMS that aligned with new business requirements.

  • Logic mapping of fields from old to new CMS

  • Minimize risk to traffic and advertising delivery.

  • Prioritizing launch vs. non-launch requirements, and organizing the latter as known must-haves vs. needs updated business requirements review

  • Ensure continuity of systems integrations, working with partners in audience infrastructure, advertising, and data analytics.

CMS Data Migration Process


Project results
Successful migration of article data with no non-scheduled downtime, and no major blockers 

Integrated systems performed as expected, with no outages

Refined taxonomy that brought the brand in line with best practices for SEO

Steady, no decline, in traffic with a slight uptick in the weeks post-migration

©Kristin Lenz

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“Creativity is the ability to find order in chaos.” — Simon Sinek