Why ‘lift and shift’ content migration is almost never a good idea
If you were a kid or teen growing in the greater New York area during the late-20th Century, you could probably close your eyes and conjure up this shabby, careworn kitchen from the 1950s sitcom, The Honeymooners.
Unlike The Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best, and nearly every other TV sitcom of that era, The Honeymooners cast of characters were people who hadn’t come close to achieving the 1950s middle-class American dream, but desperately wanted in on The Affluent Society — or at the very least, out of working class poverty. For the male lead: big, loud, abrasive bus driver, Ralph Kramden, this inevitably entailed hatching a ‘foolproof’ get-rich-quick scheme with his dim-but-likeable friend, Ed Norton. And so it went for 39 episodes:
- Ralph cooks up a dumb “get rich quick scheme” with his pal, Norton
- Ralph brags about the dazzling scheme to his wife, Alice
- Alice points out that scheme is dumb, Ralph disagrees, and a fight ensues
- Dumb “get rich quick” scheme tanks in the most embarrassing, public way possible.
- Temporarily chastened Ralph crawls back to Alice, who unaccountably forgives him. They reconcile and hug as Ralph intones, “baby, you’re the greatest!” Fade to black.
And this relates to Content Strategy how, exactly?
Here’s how: Throughout my various UX and Content roles, I’ve sat in countless meetings where I heard highly placed stakeholders offer product pitches that reminded me of nothing so much as Ralph blowharding his latest doomed scheme to long-suffering Alice. Occasionally my org chart location allowed me to challenge those puffed-up dreams, albeit far more diplomatically than Alice ever did. At other times, silence was the better part of continued employment
But when I heard some variation on…
If we pour our old content in a shiny, new website with all the look and feelz, our users will love it.
I couldn’t help but recall Ralph Kramden’s boast:
“It won’t be long now, sweetheart. We’ll be living on Park Avenue. And wait till you see how different this furniture looks in a Park Avenue apartment!”
It’s a brilliant line because Ralph is so clueless about the ways of wealth, that even as he dreams of moving up to a posh New York City address, he imagines it filled with the same crummy furniture. But when a corporate executive chooses to upgrade their company’s website by moving all the same under-performing content into an expensive new container — a so-called, ‘lift and shift,’ some people call it a wise business move. Well no, it’s not.
Lift and Shift is bad for so many reasons
- Lift and shift assumes that people come to websites to revel in the delights of the company’s web presence, something which only corporate narcissists believe.
- It ignores all the available data on why people are visiting (or leaving) the website
- It dumps all the questionable content decisions accrued since the last website design right into the user’s lap and says, “here, you sort out what matters.”
- It retains every bit of outdated, misleading or mistaken information that was there before, but with the gloss of a new frame.
So why do people do it?
Well, here’s where the other plot point of The Honeymooners comes into play. See, Ralph’s schemes aren’t totally implausible in concept, just not very well thought out in practice. Nobody, whether loudmouth bus driver in an old sitcom, or over-promoted C-suite manager, does stupid things for their own sake. They always have an OK-sounding, if poorly reasoned rationale.
And poorly-reasoned rationales for Lift and Shift abound. It’s cheap! It promises to take less time, (though in practice, it often takes more.) In organizations whose web navigation mirrors the org chart, whose content serves as a lengthy shout out to all the opaquely-named internal departments and whose brand strategy rests firmly on the assumption that the larger world is just as fascinated by the company’s work as its C-suite executives are, Lift and Shift offers no pushback.
But Ralph’s boast about the furniture suggests a simpler, more benign explanation. Just as it never occurred to him that moving to a posh NYC address requires a furniture upgrade, the person arguing for Lift and Shift has likely never considered that the same old content won’t work on a new website.
Pushing Back Against Lift and Shift
If organizational stakeholders are advocating for Lift and Shift content migration after project kickoff, that’s already a problem. The very first words I spoke to clients as a newly-minted Content Strategist were in a gentle but firm argument against the primary contractor’s Lift and Shift strategy. Teams need to weave purposeful content strategy into their project spec from the beginning. Without it, and minus the vision required to see its flaws, stakeholders will default to “Lift and Shift.” And that’s like moving Alice Kramden’s shabby kitchen table into a doorman building on the Upper East Side.
