The Challenge of Moving Between CMS Platforms
As CMS platforms become more robust and unique, there is an ever-growing need for custom migration solutions. CMS platforms, from the classics like Drupal, WordPress and Craft CMS to headless models like Directus and Sanity, each have their own unique methods for data structure and rendering. This can lead to some tricky and time-intensive work when attempting to migrate from one platform to another, requiring thorough technical migration architecture to ensure continuity of content, media, and SEO.
This is a very common issue for agencies; clients understand they need a modern CMS approach to their site, for content management and user experience, and almost every project requires some form of data migration. Enter Claude Code, a sophisticated LLM that can review data structures, offer solutions for migration, and help navigate the sometimes-messy work of replatforming a site.
Modern LLMs like Claude, Copilot, and ChatGPT are trained on endless DevOps, coding knowledge bases, product documentation, and support forums reaching back to the earliest days of CMS. This knowledge gives these tools an expert touch when it comes to migration tasks. As a 20+ year developer who has worked on many migrations over the years, it is kind of wild to ask Claude Code for a general approach to something like a Drupal 7 to a WordPress 6 or 7 migration and see answers and solutions that I've used in the past. The real power of the tool comes from prompting Claude Code to think deeper and develop new, modern approaches to migrations.
At Graybox, our development team uses Claude Code across five parts of the migration process: mapping data architecture, building import tools, migrating media, validating the result, and documenting what we learned for the next project.
1. Technical Migration Architecture
Planning is one of the most important aspects of a migration. Building a thorough and detailed migration architecture will ensure that all relevant data, media, and content will be carried forward to the new project.
Let’s use an example of how Claude Code can help set up migration architecture from Craft CMS to WordPress. Craft CMS is a great CMS platform for building robust sites with deep, often custom, relational data structures. Where this may differ from WordPress is how that data is referenced. Craft uses flexible fields, entries, and IDs for just about every piece of data and media, whereas WordPress uses a very rigid core of posts, pages, meta, custom fields, and taxonomies.
Personally, I like rigidity in data structures; custom solutions work great but can often be difficult to maintain and train client users on. Through Craft we can export example data files for each entry type, field type, category, and so on, then we have Claude Code map the applicable IDs into tables. As WordPress is rigid, the LLM already knows how those IDs may apply to the new system.
Think about this as a map of how each bit of data goes from here to there. This map helps inform the technical architecture of a migration and saves your team time and resources better suited for building.
For example, Craft's Matrix and relational fields rarely map one-to-one onto WordPress, so we have Claude Code flag those cases up front rather than discovering them mid-import.
2. Building Custom Import Tooling
Once the architecture is mapped, we use Claude Code to build platform specific import scripts that pull content into its new structure. Things like WordPress custom fields, Gutenberg blocks, Craft entries, or whatever the destination platform requires. This is especially important for complicated taxonomic relationships like a Craft category tree with parent and child relationships. These need to map correctly to WordPress taxonomies or the site loses the ability to filter and relate content the way editors expect.
In the past, we wrote these scripts by hand. The process was slow and testing each one against real data usually resulted in edge cases that required revisions. We now use Claude Code to iterate the scripts against sample data, which cuts down the number of failed import attempts we would otherwise catch on production data.
3. Building Media Sync Tools
Claude Code can help migrate media, optimize images and documents for web, and help point media to its correct content while also ensuring SEO metadata stays intact. Building custom tooling for media sync and migration also allows us to be specific about how and where media loads. This is critical because a broken image path or a stripped alt tag during media migration can hurt months of SEO work in a single import.
Image migration is a good example. Images carry their own search value. They're indexed and have their own URL, which means an image URL needs the same redirect treatment as a page URL. We will often check Search Console's image search data before migration to see which images are earning clicks, so we know which ones need a mapped redirect and which can be safely dropped.
We use Claude Code to build that redirect map alongside the content migration, so alt text, file names, and image-to-content relationships move together during the import. Reindexing after a platform change takes time. It typically takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on the size of the site, which is why it’s important to catch broken image paths before launch.
4. Data Validation and Quality Assurance
Once the tooling is built and migration is in progress, Claude Code can also analyze the destination databases or JSON formats to ensure that the migration is 1:1 with the new platform. That includes checking that new content follows current AI SEO best practices, like schema markup and structured data.
This is especially useful for migrations involving thousands of pages. Before tools like Claude Code, data validation was a manual process and would result in gaps that showed up as broken links or missing metadata after the platform went live. We now use Claude Code to run that comparison against every entry, which cuts down the maintenance work our team and the client handle after launch.
5. Setting Ourselves Up for Success
These tools are not just a means to an end; they also support education that can be used in future migrations. Migrations have always presented unique challenges, but Claude Code now helps us document field mapping, import scripts, and the issues we ran into on each project.
We keep this documentation in a CLAUDE.md file within the project, a file Claude Code reads automatically at the start of every session. A migration's CLAUDE.md can hold field maps, redirect conventions, and any platform-specific quirks we ran into, so Claude already has that context when it starts work on the project. Claude Code's auto memory captures things that come up along the way, like a workaround for a specific data structure or a debugging insight. For platform pairings we handle often, we've packaged this knowledge into a skill, a set of instructions Claude Code loads on demand when it recognizes a similar migration, carrying the field mapping logic and known issues into the next project.
Keeping this documentation gives our design, development, and QA teams readily available reference material from past migrations.
The Takeaway
It’s important to note that each of these use cases does not replace the judgment of a developer who understands the client's data. They do cut down the hours spent on repetitive mapping and testing work, so our team spends more time understanding how the client will use the new platform day to day and shaping what the content looks like once it's there.
If your team is weighing a CMS migration, or has one underway that's running behind schedule, reach out for a consultation. Our experienced team of developers and designers will provide the insight and processes to ensure your migration is successful.
