Migrating from headless legacy: a 6-week playbook

Phase-by-phase migration plan for teams moving off Sanity, Strapi, or Prismic.

Migration arrows on whiteboard

Most CMS migrations fail not because the destination is bad — they fail because the timeline is unrealistic. Six weeks is a sweet spot for teams under 20 editors.

Week 1: schema design. Week 2: content migration script. Weeks 3–4: parallel write to both systems. Week 5: cutover. Week 6: legacy retirement and editor training.

The single biggest source of risk is reference fields. Map them carefully — Contentful's link types are stricter than most legacy systems.