Mastering CMS migrations: Solutions to 7 common challenges

Kforce experts share proven strategies for seamless CMS transitions

Companies are producing more content than ever. Reliable, intuitive content management systems are critical for exceptional customer experiences, but many marketing departments are stuck with outdated, cumbersome and ineffective platforms. To stay competitive, companies are spending time and money on CMS migrations. As consumers demand higher-end experiences, Business Research Insights projects that CMS spending will nearly double. The CMS market, which was valued at $22.9 billion in 2025, is expected to reach $42.8 billion by 2034.

Both marketing and IT need to be involved when choosing a new CMS platform that impacts the entire company. Marketers need platforms with upgraded capabilities, and IT needs platforms they can support operationally with development and cloud ops. Ted Horne, Kforce’s senior vice president of client solutions, recalled an example from an international agriculture company that was looking to upgrade its CMS. Marketing team members led the conversations, and the IT department felt left out of the discussion. The two departments had different needs, questions and requirements, but only one side was heard. In many cases, the marketing team makes the purchasing decisions around a CMS upgrade, and IT is stuck with maintaining a tool that another team picked, Horne said. "On the flip side, we have seen instances where the needs of marketing teams went unheeded, so marketing leveraged 'Shadow IT' to accomplish their goals," Cloninger said. Shadow IT can create significant risks to the business due to a lack of governance, cost inefficiencies and cybersecurity threats. To avoid organizational challenges, make sure voices from all teams impacted by a CMS migration are heard and considered.

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Ted Horne

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT Client Solutions

Kforce Consulting Solutions

Robby Cloninger

SENIOR DIRECTOR

Digital Kforce Consulting Solutions

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Published NOVEMBER 2024

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Bobby Vitrano

VICE PRESIDENT

Engineering Kforce Consulting Solutions

2. Promised licenses and features within a CMS platform

Nothing's worse than finally getting sign off on a new CMS product after months of vetting to learn it doesn't do what you expected, Bobby Vitrano, Kforce's engineering practice leader, said. "You're told what this magical tool can do, that anyone can use it, and it'll fix all your problems," Vitrano said. "Lo and behold, you get it in house and learn it needs total customization, it doesn't integrate with the rest of your systems and it doesn't have the security features you need. We hear this story all the time." Be thorough when you vet different CMS platforms. Make sure you understand the true use cases. Determine where self-service and customization come into play. Ensure CMS platform demos from vendors only include the functionality you will actually be licensing. Vendors sometimes conduct misleading product demos which incorporate integrations with tools that will not be included. "It's equivalent to taking a test drive of a car with premium trim but then buying the standard trim," Cloninger said. "The result: underwhelm and disappointment."

3. Asset management

Companies need a detailed plan to protect their valuable assets. This includes safeguarding critical formatting, metadata and other settings that affect the quality and search-ability of content. "Asset management is a huge component of CMS migration, and it's often oversimplified," Vitrano said. "People think, 'We'll just move it over here.' But classification, hierarchy of implementation, asset governance policy and procedures, that all needs to be figured out first to be successful." Marketing departments may choose to move to a new digital asset management tool during their CMS migration. This takes skills, time and resources their current staff might not have. "Often times you're dealing with thousands of assets," Cloninger said. "It can be a massive physical lift." Ensure that your migration plan accounts for the time and team members that need to be dedicated to asset management. If you don't have the capacity, it may be worth bringing in an external partner to oversee the migration.

4. CMS compatibility issues

5. Impacts to the user experience

To avoid downtime during a CMS upgrade, Cloninger recommends leaders create a migration plan and thoroughly test the site for bugs to ensure the user experience remains seamless. "If done well, clients can have a successful migration launch that doesn't impact the customer experience," Cloninger said. "But teams have to be thoughtful about what pages or features they roll out and when." Often, a CMS migration is an opportunity to create a different design language or brand experience. Customers may encounter different content, design or layouts from page to page, resulting in an inconsistent experience. With large enterprise companies, rolling out a new design language can take a year or more. Some enterprise companies have thousands of pages that will need re-designing. Cloninger recommends prioritizing the most visited and used pages or flows as your low-hanging fruit.

6. CMS upgrades and change management

Effective change management ensures your team loves your new CMS. Training may take time away from other high-value tasks, so transparency throughout the migration process ensures business-critical tasks don't suffer. Horne encourages leaders to set clear expectations around the new platform and ensure employees leverage its full capabilities. Otherwise, companies may find themselves switching to new tools at a higher rate, with each change adding new costs. The vice president of marketing at a publishing house once explained the risk of poor expectation setting as a costly cycle. Leaders weren't clear about why they were purchasing the new CMS, what it could and couldn't impact, and what team members would need to do to unlock that value. "As a result, he saw the company fall into a pattern of, 'Buy a tool. Don't set expectations correctly. Teams are frustrated. Buy another tool,'" Horne said. "It felt like every six months they were looking for a new product because the team wasn't properly prepared for what the current tool could and couldn't achieve."

7. Unexpected costs of a CMS migration

Even if you can’t plan for the unexpected, budget for it. A new CMS often requires additional development or customization. "It's critical to partner with an implementation specialist who can set realistic expectations forged through past migrations and deployments," Cloninger said. Internal training and additional licensing fees are two commonly missed budget lines. Marketing teams mistakenly think they only need one platform license when in fact each user needs their own seat. Many CMS providers are using a cloud-first model that charges based on consumption as well as licensing. This creates cost uncertainty if use is hard to estimate. Also be aware that many CMS providers will try to sell an entire experience platform filled with tools, but these are only beneficial if marketing team plans to maximize each element. "Decision makers need to carefully vet the offerings and determine whether their teams will use all the tools they're purchasing," Horne said. "If not, what appeared to be a great deal becomes a sunk cost."

Before a CMS can be migrated, leaders should produce an application topology to understand their current platform, tools and products. That initial education and assessment is critical when Kforce helps clients develop the right migration plan. "It's important for the customer to have a deep understanding of their entire ecosystem," Horne said. "Recently we've seen the need to bring in an architect to outline what exists, what is being used, what's integrated and where other systems can be integrated. This understanding is a key part to ensuring compatibility in the migration process." Your existing solutions (custom plugins or the entire CMR) may be incompatible with the new CMS platform, so plan for time and expense of upgrades and adjustments. "It's all in the data and the details," Vitrano said. "Without proper asset mapping, a company will likely need to restart its journey at some point because of capability-related challenges, particularly around differences in content structure, custom functionality and integrations." Common issues arise around mapping complex content types, managing custom code or plugins, and maintaining third-party integrations, especially if API compatibility is lacking, Vitrano said. Differences in search functionality, scalability and performance between systems can affect user experience, while security protocols and automation workflows may need to be reconfigured. If a new CMS lacks some features like e-commerce, content versioning, analytics and editorial workflows, they may need to be custom developed and tested before a successful migration.

At Kforce, clients frequently ask us to assess problematic CMS installations. We often discover CMS platforms that are modern and capable but poorly applied for real-world use. If your existing CMS doesn’t meet your business needs, first evaluate whether the issue is the platform itself or the way it was implemented. It may be possible to adjust your existing CMS without the cost of a full CMS migration. If your organization has an antiquated CMS, there are many benefits of migrating to a modern platform. New features like personalization and analytics can improve marketing team efficiency. But to ensure such a large-scale change doesn’t negatively impact customers and employees, Kforce Digital Practice Leader Robby Cloninger said it’s important to properly prepare for and manage common challenges.

GLOBAL Cms Revenue expected by 2034

$42.8 billion

global cms REVENUE increase EXPECTED IN NINE YEARS

86% increase

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What are the most common challenges of CMS migrations?

If your company is putting time and energy into this investment, here are seven challenges to anticipate, along with advice from our Kforce Consulting Solutions experts on how to address them, or even avoid them completely.

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1. Siloed Decision making

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