Phase 1: Audit and Discovery

Migrating a site from one platform to another is about knowing what you have, what’s worth keeping, and what needs rebuilding before you move anything.

That’s what is covered in the audit and discovery phase.

A solid audit takes time, but it saves far more time and risk later.

Here’s what a proper audit and discovery phase covers.

Define the Goals of the Migration

Before you decide to move ahead, you need to be clear on what your main goal is and why you want to migrate your site off Sitecore.

Different organizations migrate for different reasons, and your goals shape almost every decision that follows.

Are you migrating primarily to:

• Cut overall costs, such as licensing and development?
• Publish faster by giving marketing more independence from developers?
• Improve site performance and Core Web Vitals?
• Simplify the technology for easier maintenance?

List all your goals and share them with your team so they all know what to prioritize when they need to choose between given options during the migration process.

Crawl Your Sitecore Site

Before you start migrating, it’s important to know what exists. A site crawl gives you a complete map of every page, file, and link on your current site.

This can be done using tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb that crawl your website to bring together the following.

• A complete URL list that includes pages, posts, files, etc. present on the website.
• An existing sitemap.xml that tells search engines what exists on the website.
• The robots.txt file that tells search engines which pages to crawl and which not to.
• Current site speed and performance scores using Google PageSpeed Insights or Google Search Console.

The Core Web Vitals, i.e., Google’s metrics for loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability, affect search engine rankings.

Before migration begins, record your current Core Web Vitals, LCP, INP, and CLS for the entire website. These become the performance baseline.

A well-built WordPress site should exceed these scores. Core Web Vitals are one of the hundreds of Google ranking signal; improving them should be the goal.

Audit Existing Content

Once you’ve crawled your website, you already have a list of pages, posts, and other content. Create a spreadsheet documenting what every page is, how it’s performing, and whether it’s worth carrying forward.

Here’s the information you should track for every page.

• URL needed for mapping in case of redirects
• Page title and content type to help you group similar pages together
• Primary keyword, meta title, meta description, alt text, and schema.
• Organic traffic of the past 12 months to list your high-performing pages
• Backlinks that make a page even more valuable
• Last updated date so you know how old or new the content is
• Word count or content depth to keep away thin content or pages that need to be removed or updated

The spreadsheet you create in this step will help you plan redirects, prioritize content rewrites, and decide what gets deleted.

Decide What to Keep, Improve, or Remove

When you are about to migrate a website that’s already there, this is a good chance for you to track what you want to keep, what needs to be removed, or what should be updated.

Once you have all of it crawled and listed in the spreadsheet, and add a column with the followng values

• Keep – for pages that are performing well, still accurate, and no changes needed.
• Improve – for pages that are valuable but outdated, thin, or poorly structured; worth rewriting during migration.
• Remove – for pages that have no traffic, no backlinks, and no ongoing relevance; safe to retire.

Plan Security and Compliance Measures

Sitecore’s enterprise-grade security often comes with compliance features like user roles and  permissions, data handling compliance, and audit logs that your organization may depend on for regulatory reasons (GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific requirements).

Here’s what you should document before migration.

• Any compliance requirements your current site meets (data privacy, accessibility standards like WCAG, industry regulations)
• User roles and permission structures that need to be recreated in WordPress
• How form data and user data are currently stored and secured, so the same protections carry over.

Review Your SEO Assets

We’ve already seen how important it is to keep a watch on your website’s SEO during migration.

Alongside the content, keep track of the SEO elements for each page on your website.

• Meta titles and descriptions of every page
• Heading tags that let search engines understand the page hierarchy
• Schema markup, or structured data
• Internal links that map the flow of link value within the internal pages of your website
• Backlinks that you’ll need to preserve through the redirects

This becomes the reference document your team can use to make sure nothing gets diluted or dropped when content moves to WordPress.

Identify Custom Features and Custom Workflows

List all the customizations added to the website so that they can be carried forward to WordPress. These could be:

• Custom personalization rules
• SXA components built specifically for your site
• Custom publishing workflows or approval chains
• Any xDB-driven behavior (content that changes based on visitor data)

Listing them now will give you time to think whether there’s a WordPress plugin that can be used or whether you’ll need custom development for this.

Review Integrations

While you make a note of everything on your website, map out every external system your site is connected to.

• CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.)
• Marketing automation platforms (Marketo, Pardot, etc.)
• Analytics tools (Google Analytics)
• Customer data platforms (CDPs)
• Any third-party APIs feeding data in or out

List down these integrations, with the data that flows through them and how important it is. This can be a part of your rebuild checklist to ensure all the lead forms and other integrations work well after migration.

What You Should Have When This Phase Is Done

To summarize phase 1, here’s what you should have by the end of your audit and discovery phase:

• A documented list of migration goals
• A complete site crawl and Core Web Vitals baseline
• A full content inventory, sorted into keep/improve/remove
• A compliance and security checklist
• A catalog of SEO assets to preserve
• A list of custom features and how they’ll be handled
• A full map of integrations and their dependencies

With these things in hand, you’re ready to move into planning how your new WordPress site should actually be structured.