Any publisher will tell you that migrating your entire digital operation to a new content management system (CMS) is a pain in the arse. You need to keep on doing your day job while also trying to reimagine how you work, and not lose a million readers' data in the process. It's technically possible. It's also not fun.Daily Maverick, an independent South African news publication, recently made the leap and came out the other side smarter, faster, and with a few hard-won lessons to share.Rowan Polovin, Daily Maverick's head of product and technology, sat down to talk through what actually happened.Daily Maverick had been running on WordPress with a patchwork of third-party tools bolted on - Campaign Monitor for email, separate analytics platforms, and a payment system doing its own thing in the corner. Getting a single, coherent view of readers and customers meant jumping between systems and hoping the picture that emerged was accurate.The ambition was to get everything in one place. The move to WhiteBeard, a headless CMS, brought content management, tagging, taxonomy and audience data under one roof.

The migration: where optimism goes to die

Polovin says that data migration was the hardest part. By some distance.Daily Maverick had over a million registered users, a billing customer base, payment information, and years' worth of content, all of which needed to move across without corruption, loss, or the kind of data incident that makes lawyers nervous. It turned out there were also data validity issues lurking inside the WordPress setup that nobody knew about. They only surfaced after the migration.The lesson here is blunt: audit your data before you move it, not after. Testing helps, but it doesn't catch everything. Polovin's advice to anyone planning something similar is to build in more trial runs and more time to surface errors because even after thorough testing, more will appear.

Website hosting on AWS was a significant line in the budget. Costs that scaled up and down with traffic, but always seemed to scale up more enthusiastically than they scaled down. Email management was another notable expense. Server costs added another layer.

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