From Contentful to WordPress: How We Delivered Zero-Downtime Migration for a High-Growth B2B SaaS Company

About PhantomBuster

PhantomBuster helps B2B sales teams automate their daily sales prospecting tasks, from building lead lists and enriching them with emails and job information, to sending personalized messages at scale.

Background

As a technology company serving thousands of users worldwide, their content plays a crucial role in educating prospects and customers about automation best practices.

With a substantial content library and a distributed team of freelance writers, PhantomBuster recognized the need for a content management system that could better support their operational requirements and growth objectives.

Their existing Contentful setup had become a significant operational bottleneck. Publishing a single article required 1.5 hours of manual work: copying and pasting text, reformatting content, and adding images one by one through Contentful's cumbersome interface. 

For a team focused on scaling their content operations, this workflow was unsustainable.

The Challenge

Phantombuster approached us with a clear objective: migrate their existing Contentful setup to WordPress while maintaining operational continuity and enhancing their content workflow efficiency.

This migration presented several complex challenges:

• Technical Scope: The migration encompassed 227 published blog posts, extensive media libraries, and complex internal linking structures that needed to remain functional throughout the transition.
• Operational Constraints: The editorial team needed to continue publishing content during the migration planning phase. Any downtime would directly impact their content marketing schedule and audience engagement.
• Content Enhancement: Beyond basic migration, there were opportunities to improve URL structures, update internal linking patterns, and modernize content elements to better serve their SEO and user experience goals.
• Team Coordination: With team members distributed across different time zones, including a 9-hour difference between our development team and their content marketing team, coordination required careful planning and the implementation of asynchronous communication protocols.

Our Migration Process

We approached this challenge with a multi-phased approach, that addressed the core business question: How do you migrate a substantial content library while maintaining operational velocity and improving team productivity?

Assessment and Proof of Concept

We began with migration scripts in a controlled environment, mapping the complete data structure and identifying potential complications before touching production systems.

Many migration failures occur because agencies skip this crucial testing phase. Our POC approach enabled accurate timelines and repeatable processes that could be tested multiple times to ensure reliability.

Technical Implementation and Optimization

We leveraged Contentful's CLI tools, to systematically export all content. Then we developed a custom ETL pipeline and carefully crafted transformation scripts to restructure data that would fit the WordPress schema, ensuring compatibility and preserving content integrity.

Initial WordPress plugin tests revealed performance issues with large content volumes. Our team nimbly pivoted to an ELT approach using WP-CLI. The server-side approach proved worth it as it significantly mitigated the risk for timeouts.

Content Enhancement During Migration

We saw this migration as more than just moving data from point A to point B. It was a chance to make meaningful improvements along the way.

Our automated processes handled over 3,000 internal links across all blog posts, turning what could have been weeks of tedious manual work into seamless background optimization. We transformed Contentful's clunky ID-based URLs into clean WordPress permalinks that work better for both SEO and brand consistency.

We also took the opportunity to boost content engagement wherever it made sense, swapping out static banner images for embedded YouTube videos and cleaning up formatting to make everything more readable and engaging.

Quality Assurance and Validation

Our QA process included dedicated review cycles to verify content integrity, proper character encoding for all content types, including emojis and special characters, and validation of all media references and internal links.

The collaborative process proved seamless thanks to structured spreadsheet communication that kept all stakeholders aligned across significant time zone differences. This asynchronous approach allowed for efficient coordination without disrupting either team's workflow.

We leveraged time zone differences to our advantage, performing migration activities during PhantomBuster's off-hours to ensure zero disruption to their daily editorial workflow. Structured asynchronous communication kept all stakeholders informed throughout the process.

Execution and Risk Management

The culmination of our preparation was an efficient 30-minute execution window that transformed their entire content infrastructure. This efficiency resulted from extensive pre-migration testing, automated processes that eliminated manual intervention points, and extensive backup strategies that provided complete rollback capability.

PhantomBuster could continue publishing in Contentful until the final migration moment, maintaining its editorial momentum throughout the transition period.

Every step included verification checkpoints and backup procedures, ensuring that content integrity was maintained and that we could quickly address any unexpected issues.

Results and Business Impact

PhantomBuster gained a content infrastructure that scales with their ambitions while dramatically improving day-to-day operations.

Migration Metrics

Our technical execution delivered exactly what we promised, with precision and efficiency that set the foundation for everything that followed.

• 227 blog posts migrated successfully with zero content loss.
• 30-minute total execution time for complete content transformation.
• 3,000+ internal links automatically updated and validated.

Operational Improvements

PhantomBuster's content publishing workflow transformed dramatically. What previously required 1.5 hours of manual work in Contentful's cumbersome interface now takes just 10 minutes maximum with their new one-click Surfer-Wordpress integration.

• 90% reduction in content publishing time (from 90 minutes to 10 minutes maximum).
• Enhanced ease of use for the content marketing team and decreased developer dependency.
• Streamlined integration capabilities supporting AI-powered content workflows.

Technical Enhancements

Our automated internal link replacement proved invaluable, addressing one of migration's biggest pain points.

• Clean permalink structure replacing ID-based URLs.
• Enhanced content engagement through modernized media elements.
• Robust internal linking structure supporting better user navigation.

Performance and SEO Impact

The migration delivered measurable SEO improvements with a 20% organic traffic increase achieved without any content modifications. The combination of improved page performance and semantic URL restructuring contributed to these gains.

• 20% increase in organic traffic post-migration.
• Enhanced URL structure supporting improved SEO performance.
• Significant page performance improvements.

Client Experience

The technical success was matched by a collaborative process that made the complex simple, even across significant time zone challenges.

• Structured communication protocols enabling seamless international collaboration.
• Asynchronous coordination across 9-hour time zone differences.
• Transparent project management with centralized change tracking.

Conclusion

This migration showcased the importance of thorough preparation and the value of treating content migration as both a technical and operational challenge.

Our experience with decoupled architectures meant we understood a headless CMS data structure intuitively. By combining deep CMS expertise with an understanding of editorial workflows, we delivered a solution that enhanced rather than disrupted ongoing operations.

Unlike purely technical migration services, we designed the process around PhantomBuster's business needs, maintaining content production schedules while improving long-term operational efficiency.

Partner with Us for Your Content Operations

If your organization is experiencing content operation bottlenecks, platform limitations affecting team productivity, or complex migration requirements, our team brings the technical expertise and operational understanding to execute seamlessly.

Get in touch to discuss your content management challenges and explore how our proven migration process can accelerate your content operations without disrupting business continuity.