---
title: "CMS migration checklist — move a whole website off a legacy CMS"
description: "The complete website migration checklist: content and media, brand and design tokens, translations, forms and integrations, rebuild and launch — manual tools and hours vs. automated with Sitejump."
canonical: https://sitejump.dev/knowledge/cms-migration-checklist
lang: en
lastmod: 2026-08-14
---
# CMS migration checklist

Moving a website off WordPress, Drupal, HubSpot, Sitecore or Shopify is many separate jobs, not one. Each row shows the step done manually by a web developer or agency (with the tools and hours it costs on a ~250-page multi-language site) against what Sitejump delivers automatically. Rankings are a separate list: see the SEO and GEO migration checklist at https://sitejump.dev/knowledge/seo-migration-checklist.

Manual total across the seven phases: 100–224 hours of specialist time, plus tool licences.

## 1. Inventory the whole site (manual 12–20 h)

| Step | Manually | Sitejump |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Complete page and URL inventory | Paid crawler, then reconcile with the CMS page tree | Every page crawled, counted and listed |
| Content audit: keep, merge or retire | Read every page with the content owner | Page list with metadata to decide from |
| Template and component inventory | Manual review of theme or template files | Repeating layouts and components detected |
| CMS plugin and module dependencies | List each plugin the front end needs | CMS and front-end dependencies identified |
| Forms, integrations and embeds | Click through the site to find them | Forms, embeds and scripts recorded per page |

## 2. Content and media (manual 14–24 h)

| Step | Manually | Sitejump |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Page copy with structure intact | Copy-paste per page, then repair formatting | Full structured text of every page |
| Images, PDFs and downloads | Media export plus a second crawl pass | Every asset downloaded and mapped to its page |
| Alt text and captions | Retyped after every re-upload | Carried with each image |
| Embedded video, maps and iframes | Found and re-inserted by hand | Recorded per page and rebuilt |
| Visual reference of each old page | Screenshot one URL at a time | Full-page screenshot per page |

## 3. Brand and design (manual 10–16 h)

| Step | Manually | Sitejump |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Colour palette | Eyedropper or theme stylesheet digging | Extracted from the live stylesheet as tokens |
| Typography and type scale | Read computed styles per heading level | Families, weights and scale detected |
| Logo, favicon, social images | Hunt source files, regenerate icon set | Pulled with the assets |
| Navigation, header and footer | Re-create menus from old markup | Structure written into the project by the agent |
| Responsive behaviour | Test every template at each breakpoint | Responsive components from the start |

## 4. Translations and locales (manual 6–12 h)

| Step | Manually | Sitejump |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Every language and region version | Walk the switcher and CMS translation tables | All locales detected automatically |
| URL structure per locale | Agree prefixes, rewrite the map per language | Per-locale routes proposed in the rebuild plan |
| Translations paired with their source page | Export per locale and re-pair by hand | Kept paired automatically |

## 5. Forms, integrations and tracking (manual 10–18 h)

| Step | Manually | Sitejump |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Contact and lead forms | Rebuild fields, wire delivery, test each one | Fields captured; the agent rebuilds them |
| Newsletter, CRM, marketing automation | Re-authenticate and re-point endpoints | Listed, then reconnected in your Lovable project |
| Site search, gated content, logins | Choose a replacement and rebuild the flow | Existing behaviour documented for the rebuild |
| Analytics, tag manager, pixels | Dig IDs out of old templates | GA4, Tag Manager and pixel IDs re-applied |
| Cookie consent and privacy notices | Re-install and re-gate scripts | Consent scripts detected and flagged |

## 6. Rebuild in Lovable (manual 40–120 h)

| Step | Manually | Sitejump |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Project and component system | Scaffold stack, tokens, base components | Design tokens and patterns delivered in the package |
| Build every page | Implement each template against a screenshot | The Lovable agent writes pages from your package |
| Track what is done | A spreadsheet that goes stale | Page-by-page progress tracked through the MCP |

## 7. Launch and the first weeks (manual 8–14 h)

| Step | Manually | Sitejump |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Redirect rules deployed | Hand-write _redirects, vercel.json, nginx or .htaccess | Config file generated for your host |
| DNS and hosting cutover | Lower TTLs, switch records, re-test host variants | Exact setting to apply, and where |
| Old URLs tested against the live domain | Spot-check a sample | All old URLs tested, free to re-run |
| Sitemap submitted, coverage watched | Submit by hand, check weekly | Submitted and monitored from your Lovable project |
| Rollback plan | Keep the old CMS running, write a runbook | Package and rebuild versioned in your project |

## How it is set up

1. Paste your website address — the free audit samples five pages plus your sitemap.
2. Pay for the migration — the full crawl builds your package.
3. Connect the Sitejump MCP to your Lovable project (https://sitejump.dev/mcp-connect).
4. Ask Lovable to rebuild — the agent works page by page from the package.
5. Connect Google Search Console, Analytics and any other integration inside your own Lovable project.

## Common questions

**How long does a CMS migration take?** By hand, roughly 100–224 hours of specialist time for a 250-page multi-language site. With Sitejump the extraction is automated and the rebuild is written by the Lovable agent.

**What breaks most often?** Forms that stop delivering, missing 301 redirects, images left in the old media library, tracking and consent scripts left behind, and untranslated pages under translated URLs.

**Do I lose rankings when I change CMS?** Not if every old URL has a 301 destination and the on-page signals move with it — see https://sitejump.dev/knowledge/seo-migration-checklist.

**Can I keep my translations?** Yes. Every language version is detected and kept paired with its source page.