Content Management System (CMS) Exit Checklist: A CMS Migration Checklist for Auditing Lock-In Risk

A CMS migration checklist should begin with an exit audit that measures vendor lock-in before development starts, since moving content involves extracting, transforming, validating, and loading data rather than simply copying it between incompatible systems. The audit examines nine areas: content models and export fidelity, API queries and SDK dependencies, authentication and role configuration, plugins and integrations, media ownership and transformation pipelines, infrastructure and hosting control, and contractual and licensing risks. It recommends testing real, production-like exports because documentation may not reveal missing relations, excluded assets, rate limits, unavailable bulk exports, or import failures, while also cataloging every vendor-specific query, response format, SDK call, and configuration that requires rewriting. Teams should distinguish portable business logic from platform-specific wiring, document UI-only permissions and identity settings, assess ownership of databases and asset buckets, and review termination windows, API availability, deletion obligations, switching charges, and open-source governance risks. A three-level scoring model rates each area as portable, partially locked, or fully locked, producing a migration sequence that addresses the most restrictive dependencies first and favors target platforms with version-controlled schemas, standard interfaces, accessible databases, bulk export options, and storage controlled by the organization.

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