What does your pre-launch testing checklist look like for a CMS migration? I have a basic one but I know I am missing things. We are moving a 500-page B2B site from Sitecore to WordPress and the stakes are high.
Our migration QA checklist:
- Full crawl comparison (old vs new) checking status codes, titles, canonicals
- Visual regression testing on top 50 pages (we use Percy)
- Form submissions on every form type
- Search functionality
- 301 redirect verification (sample 10% of redirect map)
- Mobile responsive check on five device sizes
- Performance benchmarks (compare to old site)
- SSL certificate verification
- Analytics tracking verification (fire every event type)
- CDN cache behavior
- Third-party integrations (CRM, email, chat)
- User login flows if applicable
- XML sitemap accuracy
- robots.txt correctness
Add accessibility testing to that list. Run axe-core or WAVE on a sample of page templates. CMS migrations are where accessibility regressions happen silently - the old theme might have had aria labels that the new theme dropped.
and test the rollback plan. Seriously. Before go-live, practice reverting to the old site. If something goes catastrophically wrong at 2am on launch night you need to know you can get the old site back in under 30 minutes.