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School of Medicine IT

How to Copy Content When Migrating Between Sites

When a website is significantly outdated, departments may request a new, blank site and selectively copy over content that should remain. This is a good opportunity to clean up and reorganize content — but it also introduces a common migration issue.

When content is copied from an old site to a new one, images and documents may appear to copy over but actually continue to live on the old site. During copy-and-paste, these files are not added to the Media Library of the new site. Instead, they are displayed on the page while still being pulled from the old site.

Because the old site remains active during development, this issue often goes unnoticed. The content appears to work correctly until the old site is taken offline.

If images or document links continue to reference the old site, they will break as soon as the old site is taken offline — resulting in missing images and broken file links on the new website.

Why This Happens

When content is copied from one website to another:

  • Images and documents (Word files, PDFs, etc.) pasted onto a page may still be hosted on the old site.
  • The content appears to exist on the new site, but it is actually being loaded from the old site.
  • Internal links may still point to pages on the old site rather than the new one.

Once the old site is retired, those files and pages are no longer available which results in broken images and broken links on the new site.

How to Avoid Broken Images and Links

When migrating content:

Always Upload Files to the New Site.

  1. Download images and documents from the old site and upload them to the new site’s Media Library.
  2. Update links so they point to documents uploaded to the new site rather than the old site.
  3. Remove any pasted images and re-insert them from the new site’s Media Library.

Rebuild Links Intentionally

  1. Review all internal links.
  2. Confirm they point to files and pages hosted on the new site.

Perform a Final Front-End Review

Click through pages and links to confirm everything loads from the new site before launch.