The document serves as a comprehensive guide for migrating from Sitecore to Umbraco, emphasizing the advantages of Umbraco in ease of use and management. It outlines key considerations and best practices for pre-migration, during migration, and post-migration phases to ensure data integrity, SEO preservation, and overall site functionality. The importance of meticulous planning, content inventory, and collaboration with experienced partners is also highlighted to mitigate risks associated with the migration process.

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Sitecore to Umbraco Migration: The Ultimate Guide
successive.tech/blog/sitecore-to-umbraco-migration/
CMS
When it comes to content management systems (CMS), Sitecore and Umbraco are
amongst the top choices to power enterprise websites. These platforms power websites
for marquee brands across the globe.
But in a head-on Sitecore vs Umbraco comparison, the latter comes out on top because
it’s easier to set up, use, and manage. This is why many companies migrate from
Sitecore to Umbraco to avail a combination of flexibility and power that comes with the
latter.
So, how should businesses go about Sitecore to Umbraco migration? How can they plan
the CMS replatforming process to ensure that migration is completed securely and
successfully?
In our experience, for the migration process to be successful, businesses must focus on
three key areas: pre-migration, during, and post-migration. Let’s take a closer look at
each of these.
What to do before migrating to Umbraco CMS

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The Sitecore to Umbraco migration process can be risky: you can lose vital data, have
unknown broken links on your new website, lose website SEO and search engine
ranking, or fail to successfully replatform altogether. The solution? Planning.
Here is a comprehensive pre-migration checklist to help you plan your Sitecore to
Umbraco migration better and minimize risk.
1. Create a backup of your existing website
Before beginning the Sitecore to Umbraco migration process, ensure a full local and
cloud backup of your existing website to include both web root files as well as Sitecore
databases. This will ensure that in case of a failed migration, you can roll back to your
existing website and continue business as usual without disrupting operations and user
experience.
2. Create a content inventory and identify priority pages
Pre-migration, it’s critical to establish what data needs to be migrated to the new Umbraco
website. For this, it’s important to run a content inventory to understand the types and
volume of existing content. This can then be used to pull up high-priority pages that are
critical to achieving key business goals.
This process helps in more effective website migration and prepares you for altering the
new website architecture to accommodate current content.
3. Define SEO requirements for a successful transition
Website migration is a sensitive process, in that any slip-ups can lead to a drop in the
organic traffic your new website will garner. Here, it’s important to define SEO
requirements such as the URL structure, meta information, Hreflang tags, sitemaps,
structured data systems and more to developers, so that your website traffic does not
suffer.

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Also Read: How Enterprises Can Deliver True Personalization with Umbraco CMS
4. Prepare a detailed redirect plan for domain and URLs
Investigate how your existing Sitecore website handles domain and URL redirects and
create a detailed redirect plan for your new website. This plan will help you reduce the
risk of creating redirect chains, and will serve as a reference for which links will change
post-migration. It will also prevent your domain from being penalized by search engines.
5. Plan to update URLs in non-site locations
Your new website isn’t the only location where URLs will change. Post-migration, links will
also change for backlinks, paid search engine and social media campaigns, newsletters,
brochures, emails, and other areas.
Before executing the migration process, it’s important to list down non-site locations
where URLs will need to be updated so your overall website traffic is not adversely
affected.
6. Deploy a staging environment for safe migration
Migration best practices dictate that migration processes must always begin in a staging
environment inaccessible to the public, and not the live website. This helps developers
identify and eliminate any deficiencies and optimize the performance of the production
website.
How to use Umbraco Deploy for safe migration.
Umbraco’s in-built cloud and on-premises deployment engine automates various
elements of deploying a staging website to make the process faster and error-free.
How to safely migrate from Sitecore to Umbraco

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Once you’ve prepared for the CMS migration process, it’s time to execute the actual
process. Following these Sitecore to Umbraco migration steps to securely export your
data from your Sitecore website and import it to your new Umbraco CMS.
1. Export data from the Sitecore website
The first step to beginning the actual Sitecore to Umbraco migration process is to export
data from the existing Sitecore website. This can be done through the following steps.
Step 1 – Navigate to the ‘Export Languages’ tab of the Sitecore Experience Manager
control panel.
Source: Sitecore
Step 2 – Select a language and a top-level Sitecore item that will be the root element for
your data export. Click ‘Next’ and download the full XML file.

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Source: Fishtank Consulting
Step 3 – Select the item(s) you want to export. E.g., Content, Media Library, etc.

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Source: Fishtank Consulting
Step 4 – Browse and select the language file name that you want to export.

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Source: Fishtank Consulting

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Source: Fishtank Consulting
Step 5 – Click ‘Download’ to store the XML file in your local system.

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Source: Fishtank Consulting
Another way to export Sitecore data is by querying data and retrieving data from the
Sitecore content tree. The data exported—content and media—can then be uploaded to
Umbraco using custom scripts.
3. Perform the migration
The exported Sitecore data can be imported to Umbraco in one of two ways:
1. By using the CMSImport package for Umbraco

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The CMSImport package imports content into Umbraco using any one of many data
sources including CSV, XML, SQL Server, etc. This package maintains the parent/child
data structure and allows for the scheduling of data imports.
Source: Umbraco
The CMSImport Pro is the premium version of this package and allows for the import of
over 500 records. Given that this is a third-party package, its compatibility will need to be
validated during the migration process.
2. By writing custom code using Umbraco’s ContentService
Another way to import data to Umbraco is by creating and running custom code using
Umbraco’s ContentService API.
4. Enable the new website
Your Sitecore to Umbraco migration process is now complete! Now, it’s time to enable the
crawlability of your new Umbraco website and configure the front-end and back-end as
per your requirements.
What to do after migrating to Umbraco CMS

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Your Sitecore to Umbraco data transfer process is now complete! But the CMS migration
process isn’t done just yet—you need to ensure that everything went according to plan.
Before closing the migration project, use the following post-migration checklist to confirm
that your Sitecore to Umbraco website migration process was completed successfully.
1. Check for overall completeness and quality of migration
First, refer to the content inventory you’d created pre-migration and check if all listed
pages and content have been migrated completely, without any data loss. Further, scan
the new website for errors and rectify them before taking the new website live.
2. Conduct a thorough SEO check of the new website.
Implement a comprehensive SEO inspection to check for issues that can damage your
new website’s organic visibility. Some important questions to answer here include:
Is your URL structure laid out as intended, and do internal links point to new URLs
and correct status codes?
Are your pages aligned with your strategy in terms of titles, meta descriptions, body
content, etc.?
Is your website crawlable or are there structural issues leading to crawler traps?
Does the new website have a valid XML sitemap comprising indexable pages?
Does your new website have a robots.txt file with all necessary directives?
3. Check for broken or unwanted links
Post-migration, check if all URLs on-site are working correctly. Conduct an automated
SEO sweep to ensure that all broken links are identified and rectified. You can also use
Google Search Console to detect broken links using the ‘Crawl Errors’ report. Further,
ensure that websites with links to your old website update their links to direct users to the
new site.
4. Monitor website performance and track KPIs

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Closely monitor website performance and key performance indicators (KPIs). This
includes business-critical metrics associated with areas that include user acquisition,
conversion, engagement, and retention. Identify anomalies in any of these areas with
website monitoring and analytics tools to ensure your new website performs optimally.
Must Read: Building an Ecommerce Dashboard? Track These 20 Vital Metrics
CMS migration can be dicey—hire a partner to do it right!
The Sitecore to Umbraco migration process will undoubtedly have many moving parts
which can easily slip away from your control and turn the end result into a disaster.
While planning for all three stages of the CMS migration process can mitigate
replatforming risks significantly, there’s still the threat of the smallest slip-ups
compounding to become a spanner in the works. This can be avoided by working with an
experienced technology partner to manage your Sitecore to Umbraco replatforming
process.
At Successive Digital, we’re well-versed in the heavy lifting needed for CMS migration
and can help you optimize and automate the process to ensure you receive exactly what
you envisioned while also saving time and costs.
Read Next: Top 8 Design Considerations for CMS Development