# New website, old content. Who will move it, and what does that involve?

Content migration takes more than an import. Count your material, decide what stays and assign responsibility for cleanup and checks.

A meeting about a new website can easily spend an hour on the homepage. Meanwhile, the old site holds news, documents, forms and departmental pages. Someone needs to decide what happens to all of them.

If the migration scope says “move all existing content”, suppliers may imagine very different amounts of work. Count and inspect the material before asking them to price it.

## Inspect a sample instead of guessing

Choose content from several parts of the site. Identify ordinary text, tables, attachments, galleries and unusual layouts. Check whether it can be exported and whether a test import preserves a useful structure.

A simple inventory can record the address, content type, owner, decision and notes. Decisions might include moving, rewriting, merging or keeping material in an agreed archive. Confirm retention arrangements with the people responsible for the documents.

## Separate moving from improving

Importing an old PDF does not make it easier to read. Copying a page does not update the contact details. These are separate tasks that need owners and time in the schedule.

Ask suppliers to distinguish the migration mechanism, manual work and checking. Agree what happens to content published on the old site after the trial migration. Otherwise the final move can leave recent updates behind.

## Agree a result you can check

Acceptance should cover more than the number of imported records. Inspect sample pages, attachments, images, search results and redirects from old addresses. Decide beforehand whether checking covers every item or an agreed sample.

Before commissioning the new site, prepare two views: how much content you have and what work it needs. This gives suppliers a common basis for their [quotes](/en/blog/how-to-compare-project-quotes/) and helps editors understand their own workload before the launch date is approaching.

Źródło: https://tender.rtfct.com/en/blog/content-migration-cost-of-a-new-website/