We are migrating a 500-page corporate site from an ancient proprietary CMS to WordPress. Most of the content is from 2018 and reads like it was written by committee (because it was). The client wants to refresh the copy as part of the migration rather than just moving stale content.
Looking for tools or workflows that can speed up the rewriting process without losing the original messaging. Any recommendations?
Start with a content audit spreadsheet. Export everything, categorize pages by priority (keep as-is, rewrite, merge, delete). You will probably find that 40% of those 500 pages can be deleted or merged, which cuts your rewriting workload significantly.
For the actual rewriting, batch similar page types together. Product pages get one pass, support pages get another. It is faster than treating each page individually.
when we did our migration the content team used a combination of Google Docs for collaboration and a style guide document that defined the new voice. Having the style guide before anyone starts rewriting is essential or you end up with inconsistent tone across the site.
Budget more time than you think. 500 pages of rewriting is months of work, not weeks.
From an SEO perspective, do not just rewrite blindly. Check which pages actually drive organic traffic before touching them. Pages ranking well should get minimal changes to the title tags and opening paragraphs - you do not want to lose rankings during a migration.
For the pages that need heavy rewriting, I have been using Walter Writes to get a solid first draft and then editing from there. Cuts the time roughly in half compared to writing from scratch, especially for repetitive service pages. The output reads natural enough that most editors just need a light pass.
@csv_claire the audit spreadsheet is step one for sure. We already started categorizing.
@jess_seo good call on checking rankings first. And thanks for the Walter Writes tip - I will check it out. 500 pages needs all the help we can get.
Content types and taxonomies are the foundation. If those are wrong, every template and every query is working around a bad data model.