A SharePoint intranet migration should not begin with moving pages, files, or document libraries. It should begin with planning.
Many organizations outgrow their SharePoint intranet slowly. What may have started as a few team sites, department pages, shared document libraries, or internal resource hubs can become a confusing mix of outdated content, duplicate files, inconsistent permissions, abandoned pages, and unclear ownership.
By the time the organization is ready to modernize, the challenge is no longer just moving content. The real challenge is deciding what should move, what should be cleaned up, who should own it, how it should be structured, and what success should look like after launch.
A strong SharePoint intranet migration plan helps prevent the new intranet from becoming a cleaner-looking version of the same old problems. Before anything is migrated, your team should define the purpose of the new intranet, identify stakeholders, audit existing content, plan the timeline, understand risks, and agree on success criteria.
Start With Discovery
Discovery is the first major phase of a SharePoint intranet migration. This is where your team documents what exists today, what is working, what is broken, and what the future intranet needs to accomplish.
- Discovery should answer questions such as:
- What SharePoint sites, libraries, pages, lists, and workflows exist today?
- Which departments manage their own intranet content?
- What content is still accurate and useful?
- What content is outdated, duplicated, or no longer needed?
- Where do employees go today to find policies, forms, announcements, documents, and internal resources?
- What are the biggest complaints about the current intranet?
- What workflows, permissions, or business processes depend on the existing SharePoint environment?
- What security, compliance, retention, or access requirements need to be preserved?
This phase should include conversations with leadership, IT, communications, HR, department owners, and everyday users. Leadership may care about governance, security, employee communication, brand consistency, and adoption. Employees may care more about finding the right form, locating HR policies, accessing department resources, or knowing where to go for current information.
A successful migration plan needs both perspectives.
Identify Stakeholders Early
A SharePoint intranet migration affects more than the IT team. It usually involves communications, HR, legal, operations, department leaders, executive sponsors, and employees across the organization.
Before content is moved, identify the key stakeholders and define their roles.
Common stakeholder groups include:
- Executive sponsors who approve direction, budget, priorities, and major decisions.
- IT teams who manage SharePoint configuration, permissions, integrations, authentication, and technical requirements.
- Communications teams who manage company news, announcements, homepage content, and employee messaging.
- HR teams who often own policies, benefits information, onboarding materials, employee resources, and internal forms.
- Department owners who maintain team-specific pages, documents, procedures, and resources.
- Legal or compliance teams who may need to review retention policies, sensitive content, access rules, or regulated materials.
- End users who will rely on the intranet after launch.
Each stakeholder group should understand what decisions they own. Without clear ownership, migration projects often stall during content review, navigation planning, permissions mapping, design approval, or final launch validation.
Define the Purpose of the New Intranet
Before planning structure or content, define what the new intranet is supposed to do.
- Is it primarily an employee communication hub?
- Is it a document and policy center?
- Is it a department resource portal?
- Is it replacing an outdated SharePoint environment?
- Is it a centralized home for company news, forms, and internal tools?
- Is it being rebuilt as a cleaner, more flexible intranet outside of SharePoint?
The answer may be a combination of these, but the priorities matter. A communication-heavy intranet may need strong homepage planning, news publishing workflows, audience targeting, and editorial governance. A document-heavy intranet may require more attention to metadata, permissions, library structure, version history, search, and document ownership.
For organizations migrating a SharePoint intranet to WordPress, this planning step is especially important. The goal is not just to move content from one system to another. The goal is to rebuild the intranet experience in a way that is easier for employees to use and easier for internal teams to maintain.
Audit Existing Content
A content audit is one of the most valuable steps in any SharePoint intranet migration. It helps determine what should be migrated, rewritten, archived, consolidated, or deleted.
Many SharePoint intranets contain years of outdated or duplicate content. Migrating everything may feel faster, but it often creates a poor experience for employees and makes the new intranet harder to manage.
During the audit, review content by type, owner, age, usage, accuracy, and business value. Pages, documents, libraries, lists, forms, policies, news posts, employee resources, and department hubs should all be evaluated.
A simple content audit can classify each item into one of these categories:
Migrate: The content is current, accurate, useful, and should move to the new intranet.
Revise: The content is useful but needs updates before migration.
Consolidate: Multiple pages, files, or libraries cover the same topic and should be merged.
Archive: The content should be retained but not published on the new intranet.
Delete: The content is outdated, redundant, inaccurate, or no longer needed.
The audit should also identify missing content. A migration is often the right time to fill gaps, improve key employee resources, and create a better structure for important information.
Map Content Ownership
Every important page, document library, policy, form, or resource area should have an owner. This is especially important in intranet environments, where content can become stale quickly if ownership is unclear.
Content owners should be responsible for reviewing, approving, and maintaining their content before and after migration.
For example:
- HR may own employee policies, benefits information, onboarding materials, and handbook content.
- IT may own technology support resources, security policies, and internal request forms.
- Communications may own news, announcements, homepage content, and company-wide messaging.
- Legal or compliance may own regulated policies, privacy notices, and required disclosures.
- Each department may own its own department landing page, documents, and resources.
Your migration plan should document:
- Who owns each major content area.
- Who can edit content.
- Who can approve content.
- Who should be contacted during review.
- How often content should be reviewed after launch.
- What happens when ownership changes.
Clear ownership helps prevent the new intranet from becoming outdated shortly after launch.
Review Information Architecture and Navigation
A SharePoint intranet migration is a chance to improve how employees find information. The old structure should not automatically be recreated in the new environment.
Review the current navigation and ask whether it reflects how employees actually look for information. Many older intranets are organized around internal department structures rather than employee needs. For example, employees may not know whether a form belongs under HR, finance, operations, or administration. They just want to find the form.
Information architecture planning should include:
- Top-level navigation.
- Department or hub site structure.
- Employee resource categories.
- Audience-specific content areas.
- Search behavior.
- Metadata and tagging.
- Document library organization.
- Page templates.
- Naming conventions.
- Relationships between departments, policies, forms, and resources.
Good intranet planning balances simplicity with scalability. The structure should be easy for employees to understand and realistic for content owners to maintain.
Plan Permissions and Access Controls
Permissions are one of the most important parts of a SharePoint intranet migration. Before moving content, review who should have access to each site, library, page, document group, and private resource area.
Some intranet content may be available to all employees. Other content may be limited to leadership, HR, finance, legal, managers, board members, or specific departments. Migrating permissions without reviewing them can carry forward outdated access rules and create unnecessary security risks.
The migration plan should address:
- Who can view content.
- Who can edit content.
- Who can approve content.
- How permissions will be grouped.
- Which permissions can be simplified.
- How private or sensitive documents will be handled.
- How role-based content should work in the new intranet.
- How new pages, libraries, and sections will be created after launch.
Permissions should be reviewed as part of the planning process, not treated as a technical detail at the end of the project.
Review Forms, Workflows, and Integrations
Many SharePoint intranets include more than pages and documents. They may also include request forms, approval workflows, employee directories, lists, notifications, custom web parts, SSO touchpoints, or integrations with other internal systems.
Before migration, document which features are business-critical and which ones can be simplified or replaced.
This may include:
- Employee directory data.
- Policy acknowledgment forms.
- IT request forms.
- HR forms.
- Approval workflows.
- Internal notifications.
- Department-specific lists.
- Search functionality.
- Authentication and SSO requirements.
- Restricted employee resources.
- Custom SharePoint components.
Not every feature should be rebuilt exactly as it exists today. Some workflows may be outdated. Some forms may be redundant. Some custom functionality may be better replaced with simpler tools or a cleaner intranet structure.
The planning phase should separate what must be preserved from what can be improved.
Build a Realistic Timeline
A SharePoint intranet migration timeline should include more than the technical move. Planning, content review, design, configuration, testing, training, and launch support all take time.
A typical migration timeline may include:
- Discovery and stakeholder interviews.
- Content inventory and audit.
- Information architecture planning.
- Permissions and access review.
- Design and template planning.
- SharePoint or destination-platform configuration.
- Content cleanup and migration preparation.
- Test migration.
- Content review and quality assurance.
- User acceptance testing.
- Training and documentation.
- Final migration.
- Launch communications.
- Post-launch support and optimization.
The size and complexity of the timeline depends on the amount of content, number of stakeholders, permission requirements, design needs, workflow complexity, and the condition of the current SharePoint environment.
The most common timeline mistake is underestimating the time required for content review. Departments may need weeks to review and approve their pages, documents, policies, and resources. Build that time into the schedule early.
Identify Migration Risks
Every intranet migration has risks. Planning for them early helps avoid delays and surprises.
Common SharePoint intranet migration risks include:
- Outdated content being migrated into the new intranet.
- Duplicate pages and files creating confusion.
- Unclear content ownership.
- Stakeholders delaying approvals.
- Permissions becoming too complex.
- Sensitive content being exposed to the wrong audience.
- Important links breaking after migration.
- Employees struggling to find information after launch.
- Search not returning useful results.
- Large document libraries requiring cleanup.
- Forms or workflows not translating cleanly.
- Custom SharePoint functionality requiring replacement.
- Lack of training for content owners.
- Low employee adoption after launch.
A good migration plan should include a risk register or at least a clear list of known concerns, along with mitigation steps.
For example, broken links can be reduced with redirect planning and link testing. Adoption risks can be reduced with training, launch communications, and employee feedback sessions. Permission risks can be reduced with access reviews and role-based testing before launch.
Define Success Criteria Before Migration
Success should be defined before anything moves. Otherwise, the project may be judged only by whether the content was technically migrated.
A SharePoint intranet migration should be measured by business outcomes and user experience, not just completion.
Success criteria may include:
- Employees can find key information faster.
- Outdated content is reduced.
- Duplicate content is consolidated.
- Departments have clear content ownership.
- Permissions are simplified and secure.
- Important pages, files, forms, and links work correctly after launch.
- Search results are more useful.
- Content owners know how to update their sections.
- The intranet supports future growth.
- Employees understand where to go for key resources.
- The organization has a governance plan for ongoing maintenance.
These criteria should be documented and shared with stakeholders. They will help guide decisions throughout the project and provide a clear way to evaluate the migration after launch.
Prepare for Testing and Validation
Testing should be part of the migration plan from the beginning. It should not be treated as a final quick review before launch.
Testing should include both technical validation and user testing. Technical validation may include checking migrated pages, links, files, permissions, metadata, search indexing, forms, web parts, and navigation. User testing should confirm that employees and content owners can actually use the new intranet effectively.
A testing plan may include:
- Page-by-page content review.
- Document library validation.
- Permission testing.
- Navigation testing.
- Search testing.
- Form and workflow testing.
- Mobile and browser testing.
- Accessibility review.
- Stakeholder approval.
- End-user feedback sessions.
Testing helps ensure the new intranet is not only functional, but usable.
Plan Training and Launch Communications
Even a well-built intranet needs a launch plan. Employees need to know what changed, where to go, and how the new intranet helps them.
Content owners also need training so they can maintain their pages and libraries after launch. This may include how to edit pages, publish news, manage documents, follow naming conventions, request new content areas, and comply with governance standards.
Launch communications should explain:
- Why the intranet changed.
- What employees can do in the new intranet.
- Where important resources are located.
- Who to contact for help.
- What content is still being improved.
- How feedback can be submitted.
A SharePoint intranet migration should not feel like a surprise to employees. Communication before, during, and after launch can make a major difference in adoption.
Avoid the Lift-and-Shift Trap
One of the biggest mistakes in a SharePoint intranet migration is treating it as a simple lift-and-shift project. Moving everything exactly as it exists today may be faster in the short term, but it often preserves the same problems that made the old intranet difficult to use.
A migration is an opportunity to simplify, modernize, and improve.
That does not mean every piece of content needs to be rewritten or redesigned, but it does mean every major content area should be reviewed with purpose.
Before moving anything, ask:
- Does this content still serve employees?
- Is it accurate?
- Is it easy to find?
- Does it have an owner?
- Does it belong in the new intranet?
- Should it be combined with something else?
- Should it be archived instead?
These questions help ensure the new intranet starts clean and stays useful.
Planning a SharePoint intranet migration is about more than preparing files and pages for transfer. It is about understanding the current environment, defining the future experience, aligning stakeholders, reducing risk, and creating a structure that employees can actually use.
The best migrations happen before anything moves. Discovery, content audits, stakeholder planning, governance, timelines, risk management, and success criteria all help create a smoother migration and a stronger intranet after launch.
A thoughtful plan gives your organization a clear path forward and helps ensure that the new intranet is not just modern, but useful, organized, secure, and sustainable.
If your organization is preparing to modernize, rebuild, or move away from SharePoint, WordHerd can help you plan your SharePoint intranet migration and move the right content into a cleaner, easier-to-manage intranet.