Changing CMS During a Redesign: Should Historical Inquiries, Attachments and Follow-Up Notes Be Migrated Together?

When redesigning and replacing the CMS of an aging corporate website that has been operating for 5 to 10 years (for example, upgrading from an early DedeCMS, EmpireCMS, or legacy PHP system to a modern technology stack), its backend database often contains more than products and articles. It also holds thousands of past customer messages, inquiry form records, and customer-uploaded tender documents/drawing attachments accumulated over the years.

Companies then often wonder: “Should we import these historical inquiries and attachments into the new website's CMS admin panel exactly as they are?”

1. Why is it not advisable to put years of historical inquiries into the new website's public-facing database?

1. Security risks to personal information and trade secrets: the phone numbers, email addresses, company names, and drawing attachments customers leave in inquiries are highly sensitive data. Old attachments may even include suspicious script files that were not rigorously filtered in earlier years. Keeping thousands of historical customer records in a database on a public-facing web server for the long term makes a website plugin vulnerability highly likely to create data breach and compliance risks.
2. Incompatible field structures and bloated backups: inquiry forms on the new website typically have restructured fields (such as added budget ranges, application scenarios, and UTM source channels). Forcing a disorganized old table from five years ago into the new table not only incurs high development costs for field mapping but also makes the new website's routine database backups excessively bulky.

2. Best practice: migrate public content to the new CMS, and clean historical inquiries for a CRM or internal archive

In JVDS's corporate website redesign and content migration service, we strictly follow a migration standard that “separates public-facing content from backend customer leads”:

• Data to migrate to the new website's CMS: core product data for products still on sale, valuable customer case studies, high-quality articles that receive search traffic (preserving the original URL paths or configuring one-to-one 301 redirects), and their accompanying images compressed losslessly.
• Proper handling of historical inquiries and attachments:
  1. Hot leads from the past 6–12 months that are still being followed up: have the technical team export and clean them into standard Excel/CSV files, package them with the attachments, and import them directly into the company's CRM system (such as FXIAOKE, HubSpot, or Feishu Bitable) for continued follow-up.
  2. Archived historical leads older than 1 year: export them to an encrypted offline archive (including a database backup + a structured search index + attachment folders linked by date-based identifiers), and store it in the company's internal private cloud or intranet NAS for sales staff to retrieve at any time, keeping the newly launched website lean.