Website content migration refers to transferring digital content—such as interlinked data, rich text, images, and videos—from one content management system (CMS) or platform to another. Common reasons include reducing costs, switching to a better platform, improving performance, enhancing security, or upgrading to a modern tech stack. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What are the main types of content migration?
The main types include CMS-to-CMS migration (e.g., Strapi to Hygraph), platform-to-platform migration (e.g., traditional CMS to headless CMS), and redesign migrations (updating website design while transferring content). (Source: Hygraph Blog)
How do you plan a website content migration?
Planning involves understanding the concepts and data structures of both source and target CMSs, reviewing developer documentation, testing APIs, and mapping content models. For example, Strapi uses Content Types while Hygraph uses Models. Careful planning reduces errors and ensures a smooth migration. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What are the key steps in migrating content from Strapi to Hygraph?
Key steps include setting up models in Hygraph, building a migration service (e.g., Node.js backend), migrating assets first, then categories, authors, and articles, and preserving relationships using ID mapping. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
How do you preserve relationships between records during migration?
Use ID mapping objects to track and connect related entities (e.g., linking articles to authors and categories) during migration. This ensures data integrity and accurate relationships in the new CMS. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What are best practices for successful content migration?
Best practices include thorough testing and validation, effective communication among stakeholders, creating backups before migration, and using staging environments for incremental rollout. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
How can you validate migrated content in Hygraph?
After migration, content appears in Draft status in Hygraph. You can manually or automatically verify content and relationships, then publish and incrementally roll out to production using feature flags. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What challenges might you face when migrating large datasets?
For large datasets, in-memory ID mapping may not scale. Consider using streaming, queues, or processing entries one by one to avoid memory issues and ensure efficient migration. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
How does Hygraph support asset migration?
Hygraph provides a GraphQL API for asset management, allowing you to upload assets and maintain ID mappings for linking assets to other content types. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What documentation is available for planning a migration to Hygraph?
Hygraph offers extensive documentation for developers, including guides on models, schema setup, and API usage. Visit Hygraph Documentation for details. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
How does Hygraph handle multi-tenancy during migration?
Hygraph supports multi-tenancy, allowing organizations to manage multiple projects under one account, which streamlines migration and ongoing operations. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What are the benefits of migrating to a headless CMS like Hygraph?
Benefits include greater flexibility, scalability, efficient content delivery across multiple clients, and the ability to build customized front-end experiences. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
How does Hygraph's GraphQL API improve migration efficiency?
Hygraph's GraphQL API enables efficient data fetching, reducing over-fetching and under-fetching issues common with REST APIs, and streamlining migration processes. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What integrations does Hygraph offer for migration projects?
Hygraph supports integrations with third-party tools and services, including eCommerce platforms, analytics, and marketing automation, via webhooks and APIs. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
How does Hygraph ensure data integrity during migration?
Hygraph recommends creating backups of all website content, databases, and media assets before migration to prevent data loss or corruption. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Where can I find examples of successful migrations to Hygraph?
Hygraph provides customer case studies showcasing successful migrations and business outcomes. Visit Hygraph Case Studies for details. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What is the role of communication in a successful migration?
Effective communication between developers, content managers, and stakeholders is essential. Establishing a clear migration roadmap and regular feedback loops helps address challenges and maintain alignment. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
How does Hygraph help with incremental rollout after migration?
Hygraph allows you to publish migrated content and use feature flags for incremental rollout, ensuring stability and minimizing risk in production environments. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What resources are available for learning about Hygraph migrations?
Hygraph offers blog guides, developer documentation, and community support channels to help users plan and execute migrations. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Features & Capabilities
What are the key features of Hygraph?
Hygraph offers a headless architecture, GraphQL-powered APIs, scalability, multi-tenancy, content federation, granular roles and permissions, and integrations with third-party tools. (Source: Hygraph Blog, Hygraph Features)
Does Hygraph support content federation?
Yes, Hygraph aggregates content from multiple sources and APIs, making it easier to unify data from different platforms. (Source: Content Federation)
Hygraph provides multiple APIs, including Content API, High Performance Content API, MCP Server API, Asset Upload API, and Management API. (Source: API Reference)
What integrations are available with Hygraph?
Hygraph integrates with DAM systems (Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Imgix, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot), Adminix, Plasmic, and supports custom integrations via SDK and external APIs. (Source: Integrations Documentation)
Does Hygraph offer technical documentation?
Yes, Hygraph provides extensive technical documentation covering APIs, schema components, references, webhooks, and AI integrations. (Source: Documentation)
How does Hygraph perform in terms of speed and reliability?
Hygraph is designed for high performance, with low latency and high read-throughput endpoints. Performance is actively measured and optimized. (Source: Performance Blog)
What practical advice does Hygraph offer for API optimization?
Hygraph provides best practices and strategies for optimizing GraphQL APIs, detailed in the GraphQL Report 2024. (Source: GraphQL Report 2024)
Pricing & Plans
What pricing plans does Hygraph offer?
Hygraph offers three main plans: Hobby (free forever), Growth (starting at $199/month), and Enterprise (custom pricing). Each plan includes different features and limits. (Source: Pricing Page)
What features are included in the Hobby plan?
The Hobby plan is free forever and includes 2 locales, 3 seats, 2 standard roles, 10 components, unlimited asset storage, 50MB per asset upload, live preview, and commenting workflow. (Source: Pricing Page)
What features are included in the Growth plan?
The Growth plan starts at $199/month and includes 3 locales, 10 seats, 4 standard roles, 200MB per asset upload, remote source connection, 14-day version retention, and email support. (Source: Pricing Page)
What features are included in the Enterprise plan?
The Enterprise plan offers custom limits, scheduled publishing, dedicated infrastructure, global CDN, security controls, SSO, multitenancy, backup recovery, custom workflows, and dedicated support. (Source: Pricing Page)
Security & Compliance
What security certifications does Hygraph have?
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant (since August 3rd, 2022), ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. (Source: Secure Features)
How does Hygraph ensure data security?
Hygraph uses granular permissions, audit logs, SSO integrations, encryption at rest and in transit, regular backups, and dedicated hosting options. (Source: Secure Features)
Is Hygraph GDPR compliant?
Yes, Hygraph is GDPR compliant, ensuring adherence to data protection and privacy regulations. (Source: Secure Features)
Use Cases & Customer Success
Who can benefit from using Hygraph?
Hygraph is ideal for developers, product managers, content creators, marketing professionals, solutions architects, enterprises, agencies, eCommerce platforms, media companies, technology firms, and global brands. (Source: Case Studies)
What industries are represented in Hygraph's case studies?
Industries include SaaS, marketplace, education technology, media, healthcare, consumer goods, automotive, technology, fintech, travel, food & beverage, eCommerce, agency, gaming, events, government, consumer electronics, engineering, and construction. (Source: Case Studies)
Can you share specific customer success stories?
Yes. For example, Samsung built a scalable API-first application, Komax achieved 3x faster time to market, AutoWeb saw a 20% increase in monetization, and Voi scaled multilingual content across 12 countries. (Source: Case Studies)
What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?
Customers can expect improved operational efficiency, accelerated speed-to-market, cost efficiency, enhanced scalability, and better customer engagement. (Source: Case Studies)
What feedback have customers given about Hygraph's ease of use?
Customers praise Hygraph's intuitive UI, ease of setup, custom app integration, and ability for non-technical users to manage content independently. (Source: Try Headless CMS, Enterprise Page)
How long does it take to implement Hygraph?
Implementation time varies, but Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Si Vale met aggressive deadlines with a smooth initial phase. (Source: Top Villas Case Study, Si Vale Case Study)
How easy is it to start using Hygraph?
Hygraph offers a free API playground, free developer accounts, structured onboarding, training resources, and community support for easy adoption. (Source: Documentation)
Competition & Market Position
How does Hygraph compare to traditional CMS platforms?
Hygraph's GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, and user-friendly tools set it apart from traditional CMS platforms that rely on REST APIs and developer intervention. (Source: Hygraph Blog, Case Studies)
Why choose Hygraph over alternatives?
Hygraph offers unique advantages such as GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, enterprise-grade features, scalability, and proven ROI. It ranked 2nd out of 102 Headless CMSs in the G2 Summer 2025 report. (Source: Case Studies, G2 Summer 2025 Blog)
How does Hygraph address common pain points in content management?
What technical requirements are needed for migrating to Hygraph?
Technical requirements include understanding both source and target CMS data structures, access to APIs, and ability to build migration services (e.g., Node.js backend). (Source: Hygraph Blog)
What support does Hygraph offer during migration?
Hygraph provides onboarding calls, account provisioning, business and technical kickoffs, content schema guidance, training resources, and community Slack support. (Source: Documentation)
Website content migration is an important part of any platform change, redesign or CMS upgrade.This guide will help technical teams make a smooth transition while ensuring data loss is avoided.
Written by Aagam
on Feb 25, 2025
Website content migration is a critical process that involves transferring content from one platform to another, whether due to a CMS migration, a website redesign, or a platform switch. A poorly executed migration can result in data loss and broken links. This guide aims to help technical teams plan and execute a smooth migration, ensuring minimal disruption and preserving content integrity.
Website content migration refers to the process of moving digital content, such as interlinked data, rich text, images, and videos, from one content management system (CMS) or platform to another. The need to migrate can be driven by several factors, like reducing costs, switching to a better platform, better performance, improved security, enhanced user experience, a rebranding initiative, or just moving to a better tech stack.
There are several types of content migration, including:
CMS-to-CMS: Moving content from one CMS to another of the same type for example - Strapi to Hygraph (both are headless CMS), while preserving structure and functionality.
Platform-to-Platform: Transitioning content between different digital platforms, such as moving from a traditional CMS to a headless CMS.
Redesign: Updating the website’s design while ensuring all existing content is effectively transferred and optimized for the new structure.
For example, a business shifting from a monolithic traditional CMS to a headless CMS like Hygraph can gain greater flexibility and scalability while improving content delivery across multiple clients.
Website content migration is a complex process and would be highly driven around the purpose of migrating our data. The reason can be anything from using a less expensive solution, moving from a traditional CMS to a headless one, or just choosing another CMS for better features, better user and developer experience, and other long-term prospects. In this section, we will see step-by-step how to migrate a CMS with the help of an in-depth example where we move data from Strapi to Hygraph.
As a developer, before starting to migrate the data, it is important to understand the main concepts of both the systems like what is the nomenclature - Strapi has Content Types, while Hygraph calls the same thing Models. Carefully going through the developer documentation of both systems helps us understand how the content data is structured, how the relationships are managed, and how the assets are managed by both systems. We should check the available APIs, even play with APIs of both systems using a dummy project, seeing the request-response structures. Doing all of this helps a lot in the planning phase and decreases the chances of blunders happening later. Here is the developer documentation for Strapi, and here is the documentation of Hygraph for your reference.
Strapi Project
We will walk through an end-to-end example to see how we can plan website content migration from one CMS to another. For this example, we will create a backend service that will migrate our CMS content from Strapi to Hygraph. In case you just want to follow along you can fork this repository from Strapi and connect it to Strapi Cloud or if you want you can host this project on your server as well. We expect you to have enough developer experience to set up this project on your own.
Once this starter template from Strapi is set up you will be able to see the Content Models structured as shown below, let us understand the entities, their fields, and the relationship between them.
Category - Stores category data to which an article can belong. A Category can have many Articles, An Article can belong to only one Article.
Authors - Stores the profile of an Author, and has fields like name, email, avatar, and linked articles.
An Author can have multiple articles.
Articles - Stores the article data like title, description, cover image, relationship with author, and category.
An Article can belong to one category. An Article can be written by one Author.
Below is some sample data already loaded in by the Strapi template.
As you can see in the last screenshot above, an Article is linked to an Asset (cover), an Author, and a Category.
Hygraph Project
Next, we will need to set up similar models inside Hygraph. If you do not have a Hygraph project you can set it up here for absolutely free and get started and read more about setting up models here. Let us create three models in the Hygraph dashboard for Category, Author, and Article as shown below. These are pretty similar to the Strapi structure.
We don't have any data here yet, we will build a migration service to help us with that.
Migration Service
Now, to migrate our data from Strapi to Hygraph, we will build a Node.js backend service. It would move all the assets, categories, authors, and article data and also preserve the relationships between the records. Let us start by creating a very basic REST API.
Setting Up Migration Service
main.ts
importexpressfrom'express';
importmigrateRoutesfrom'./routes/migrate.routes';
const host = process.env.HOST??'localhost';
const port = process.env.PORT?Number(process.env.PORT):3000;
console.error('Something went wrong while migrating CMS.', err);
throw err;
}
}
}
Okay, so this basic boilerplate code will set up a REST API with a route /migrate which is tied to the migrateCMSData function in migrate.service.ts and responds with a simple Hello World for now.
For the migration, we can see from our Strapi content that we will need a way to export the following from Strapi data
Assets
Category Records
Author Records
Linked to Assets for the cover image
Article Records
Linked to Category Records
Linked to Assets for the cover image
Linked to Author Records
We can keep our logic simple - Migrate Assets & Categories first as they are not dependent on anything, and manage an IdMapping object for each content type/model migrated so we can use them for defining relationships in the dependent records like Author and Articles. Something like -
{
"strapiId":"hygraphId"
}
We will build two new services namely StrapiService and HygraphService. The StrapiService will help us pull the data from Strapi, HygraphService will be responsible for pushing the data to Hygraph, and MigrateService will use both of them and orchestrate the code flow. This will keep our code clean and structured.
Migrating Assets
Let us start by migrating assets, generally, most CMSes have separate endpoints for managing Assets.
Strapi supports both REST and GraphQL APIs. We will use Strapi's REST API to get the asset data. Hygraph
First, make a function in StrapiService to fetch all assets. We can use axios to handle the API call.
console.error('Error fetching media from Strapi:', error);
return[];
}
}
}
Hygraph provides a GraphQL API, we can use any lightweight graphql client like graphql-request Initialize the client in the constructor. Ideally, you should implement a singleton pattern to create clients for external connections, we have avoided it here to reduce the scope of this example. Create an uploadAssets function that will accept assets upload them to Hygraph, it will also maintain a Strapi ID → Hygraph ID mapping object and return it.
That's it, hit the migrate endpoint from Postman and see the migration in action.
Migrating Category, Author, and Articles
Similarly to assets, we can migrate Categories, Authors, and Articles preserving the relationships using the ID Mappings. We expect you to read and understand JavaScript / TypeScript code. Below is the final code for all three services.
As you can see we have successfully migrated everything from Strapi to Hygraph. We moved all the assets, and content records, and preserved the relationships between different models.
Let's talk a little about scaling, our example uses IdMapping objects and hence it stores all the mapping data in memory, but if your CMS has millions of records and hundreds of interdependent entities, you might consider having a different approach as we cannot have infinite memory on the server. In such cases, solutions like streaming, queues, or processing all entries and dependencies one by one like - syncing one article, syncing its author if it exists or creating one, syncing its category if it exists or creating one, and then moving to the next article might be a more efficient approach.
Testing and Validation
Once migration is complete, as you can see everything in Hygraph is in Draft status, you can verify the content and relationship manually or by automation. Once you are satisfied with the migrated content you can publish the content and use the new CMS in your frontend preferably behind a feature flag and rollout to users incrementally to ensure the production environment is stable with time. Optionally, you can also use staging environments to identify and resolve issues before going live.
Communication and Collaboration
Effective communication between developers, content managers, and stakeholders is essential for a smooth migration. Establish a clear migration roadmap with defined roles and responsibilities. Regular updates and feedback loops help address challenges promptly and maintain alignment throughout the process.
Backups and Data Integrity
We should create backups of all website content, databases, and media assets before initiating the migration. This serves as a fail-safe in case of data loss or corruption.
Hygraph is a powerful headless CMS battle-tested in production by many companies. Hygraph has all the key features that are expected from a modern CMS today and offers a modern solution for businesses seeking scalable and flexible content management. We recommend checking out our successful case studies here for insights into how our customers are using the platform.
Some of the key features of Hygraph are as follows
Headless Architecture: Separates content management from content presentation, allowing developers to build highly customized front-end experiences.
GraphQL-Powered APIs: Hygraph leverages GraphQL APIs to enable efficient data fetching, reducing over-fetching and under-fetching issues common with REST APIs.
Scalability and Performance: Designed to handle high traffic and extensive content repositories, ensuring fast and reliable performance.
Multi-Tenancy Support: Organizations can manage multiple projects under one account, streamlining operations.
Content Federation: Aggregates content from multiple sources and APIs, making it easier to unify data from different platforms.
Roles and Permissions: Enables granular role-permission settings, enhancing security and content governance.
Webhooks and Integrations: Easily connects with third-party tools and services, including eCommerce platforms, analytics tools, and marketing automation software.
If you are still using a traditional CMS to manage your content, you should definitely consider checking out our guide to choosing the best headless CMS. It explains why you should move to a headless CMS and provides an overview of available options.
In this guide, we learned that content migration from one CMS to another can be a complex but highly rewarding process in the long term if done for the right reasons. By following a well-structured migration plan, including brainstorming approaches, reading documentation in-depth, thorough testing, secure backups, and effective team collaboration, organizations can ensure a seamless transition. We also saw an in-depth example of how to migrate a Strapi CMS to Hygraph by building an intermediate Migration Service. If you're considering a content migration, investing in a CMS like Hygraph can significantly enhance content management and delivery, ensuring long-term success.
Blog Author
Aagam Vadecha
As a Software Engineer, my daily routine revolves around writing scalable applications with clean code & maintaining them. In my spare time, I love to explore software architecture patterns, write tech articles & watch thrillers!
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