Data Cleanup for Content Migrations: A Practical Workflow

Most content migrations break for the same boring reason: the input data is a mess. Titles have weird formatting, slugs step on each other, and old markup from three CMS versions ago blows up the renderer. A few cleanup steps before you import can save hours of debugging after.

Step 1: Normalize spacing

Get spacing sorted first — everything downstream depends on it. Run your text through Remove Extra Spaces and Remove Empty Lines before you do anything else.

Step 2: Replace legacy patterns

Use Find and Replace to strip out old tags, retired product codes, or mangled HTML entities that have been sitting in your database since 2014.

Step 3: Generate clean slugs

Run your titles through the Slug Generator to get URL-safe output, then check for duplicates before you push anything into the CMS.

Step 4: Validate final output

Pull a handful of samples and eyeball them. Then run whatever automated checks you have — look for empty titles, duplicate slugs, and characters that shouldn't be there.

Migration checklist

• Normalize whitespace
• Strip out legacy tokens
• Generate and deduplicate slugs
• Spot-check a sample of records
• Import in small batches, not all at once