A successful SharePoint migration in 2026 requires a pre-migration audit, compliance planning, governance setup, pilot testing, phased execution, and post-migration validation. With SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 losing Microsoft support on July 14, 2026, organizations in regulated industries face added urgency to migrate now. This SharePoint migration checklist walks through every step — and what goes wrong when you skip one.
SharePoint Migration Checklist: What to Audit, Fix, and Verify Before, During, and After Your Move
If you are reading this, you have probably already decided your organization needs to move to SharePoint Online. You are not looking for someone to convince you. You are looking for the Microsoft Sharepoint Checklist that makes sure nothing goes wrong.
This checklist comes from Joel Plaut, CEO of Reality Tech, who has led SharePoint Migration planning and strategy across regulated industries for over 30 years. Reality Tech is a Microsoft Partner specializing in SharePoint migration services for financial institutions, healthcare networks, law firms, and government agencies across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Texas, California, and beyond.
Whether you are building a SharePoint Online migration checklist for a cloud move, upgrading from an older version, or consolidating file servers, this guide covers every phase. And we do not just tell you what to do, we tell you what happens if you skip it.
Why Does 2026 Change the SharePoint Migration Planning Checklist?
Three deadlines are converging this year, and they affect every organization still running legacy SharePoint. If your SharePoint migration planning checklist does not account for these dates, you need to rethink strategy.
- July 14, 2026: SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 lose all Microsoft support. No more security patches. No more technical support. For organizations in regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, legal, running unsupported software is not just a technical risk. It is an audit finding waiting to happen.
- April 2, 2026: SharePoint 2013 workflows and Add-ins retire from SharePoint Online. If your migration plan assumes these will keep working in the cloud, it will not. You need replacement plans using Power Automate and Power Apps before you migrate, not after.
- Copilot requires governed data to function safely. Microsoft 365 Copilot is now deployed across over 2 million organizations. A March 2025 Forrester Total Economic Impact study found that enterprises deploying Copilot achieved an ROI of 116%.
But Copilot only delivers that value when your data is clean, labeled, and governed. Migrate a mess, and Copilot will surface the wrong documents, expose sensitive information, or produce unreliable results.
This means your SharePoint migration is not just a platform upgrade. It is the foundation for whether AI works safely in your organization or creates new risk.
Wondering where to start your migration journey? We got your back! Here’s a quick walkthrough:
https://youtu.be/qNONmyXpkFY?si=1RL99zGP9J4XVWnj
What Should a SharePoint Pre-Migration Checklist Include?
The SharePoint pre-migration checklist is the most critical phase of any migration project. It covers content inventory, permission audits, compliance mapping, and data cleanup. Data cleanup prevents data loss, broken workflows, and audit failures. Most migration failures trace back to this phase. Not because teams skip it entirely, most know they should do an audit. They fail because the audit is not thorough enough.
- Inventory every site, library, list, workflow, and customization. Run Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT) across your farms. SMAT surfaces unsupported customizations, long file paths, large lists, and broken links. These reports become your remediation backlog. Do not treat SMAT as optional. Treat it as a diagnostic.
What happens if you skip this: Undocumented sites and custom web parts break silently during migration. You will not discover them until users start filing support tickets weeks after go-live.
- Audit permissions with a compliance lens. Map every permission at the site, library, and item level. Pay special attention to broken inheritance; items where permissions were manually changed. In regulated environments, a single misconfigured permission can expose financial data, patient records, or legal case files to the wrong people.
For organizations subject to SOX, HIPAA, FINRA, or GDPR, this is not optional. Work with your compliance team now or bring in a partner with security and compliance expertise, to document your current access model and design the target state before migration.
What happens if you skip this: After migration, sensitive documents may become accessible to users who should not have access. Multiple SharePoint administrators have reported on Microsoft community forums that permission mismatches are among the most common post-migration issues.
- Clean ruthlessly. Every SharePoint environment collects digital clutter – outdated documents, duplicate files, unused sites, and orphaned user accounts. This content is often called ROT: redundant, obsolete, trivial.
Here is a number from our own project work: 68% of organizations discover redundant data costing $15,000 or more per year in storage fees only AFTER migration. Our pre-migration scanner identifies this before the first file moves. Clean it now, and you save money, reduce migration time, and give Copilot a better data foundation.
What happens if you skip this: You migrate terabytes of files nobody needs. Your migration takes longer, costs more, and your new environment starts messy, which means search does not work well, users cannot find what they need, and Copilot produces poor results.
- Identify every customization that needs a replacement plan. SharePoint 2013 workflows, InfoPath forms, sandbox solutions, and classic web parts will not work in SharePoint Online. Document each one, assign an owner, and build a replacement using Power Automate, Power Apps, or SPFx before migration.
What happens if you skip this: Business-critical approval workflows and forms stop working the day you go live. Operations grind to a halt while your team scrambles to rebuild them under pressure.
- Assess your compliance requirements now, not later. If your organization is subject to regulatory frameworks, document those requirements as part of this phase. Plan how Microsoft Purview retention policies and sensitivity labels will carry over to your new environment.
How Do You Build a SharePoint Migration Strategy?
Your SharePoint migration strategy should be driven by audit findings, not assumptions. Effective SharePoint migration planning starts with the data you gathered in the pre-migration phase, not a blank whiteboard.
Step 1: Choose your migration approach based on what you found. There are three paths. A) A lift-and-shift moves everything as-is. It is the fastest approach, but it carries all your existing problems into the new environment. B) A rebuild-and-modernize approach starts fresh with a new information architecture. It takes longer but gives you a cleaner, more usable result. C) A hybrid approach. This is the most common for mid-market organizations. It moves some content as-is and restructures the rest. Your audit tells you which path fits.
Step 2: Design the target information architecture before moving data. If your current environment is a maze of deeply nested folders and inconsistent naming, migrating that structure into SharePoint Online just creates a cloud-hosted maze. SharePoint works best with a flat, hub-based structure organized around how teams actually collaborate. Read Reality Tech’s guide on SharePoint information architecture best practices for a detailed walkthrough.
Step 3: Set up governance before migration, not after. Define naming conventions, metadata standards, retention policies, and sensitivity labels in your target environment before any content arrives. If you wait until after migration, you will spend months trying to retroactively organize content that users are already working in. That is expensive and disruptive. For more, see Reality Tech’s information architecture guide.
Note: For organizations planning to use Microsoft Copilot, governance is especially critical. Copilot respects SharePoint permissions and sensitivity labels. If your governance is sloppy, Copilot will surface confidential documents to people who should not see them.
Step 4: Assign clear ownership. Name an executive sponsor, an IT migration lead, a security and compliance lead, and a communications lead. For organizations where the internal IT team is already stretched thin, which is most mid-market companies, working with an experienced SharePoint consulting partner fills the gaps without hiring.
Step 5: Define success metrics before you start. Decide how you will measure whether the migration worked. Common metrics include reduced downtime, faster document search, improved compliance scores, and user adoption rates. Without metrics, you cannot prove success to leadership or auditors.
What Migration Tool Should You Use?
The migration tool you choose determines how much metadata is preserved, how smoothly permissions transfer, and how much manual cleanup you face afterward. Choosing the wrong tool creates headaches that take weeks to fix.
- For straightforward migrations: Microsoft’s SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) handles basic moves from file shares and older SharePoint versions. Migration Manager in the SharePoint Admin Center provides centralized management for larger file share projects.
- For complex, multi-source, or regulated environments: Third-party tools like ShareGate, AvePoint, or Cloudsfer offer advanced permission mapping, incremental migration, detailed error reporting, and better handling of large data volumes. Reality Tech has evaluated dozens of tools across hundreds of projects.
Our guide on how to choose the right SharePoint migration tool walks through the decision framework.
What to verify in any tool:
- Does it preserve metadata (created date, modified date, author)?
- Does it preserve version history?
- Does it handle permission mapping accurately?
- Does it provide detailed error logs you can act on?
- Does it support incremental or delta migration for phased rollouts?
- Is it compatible with your specific source system?
What happens if you choose the wrong tool: Metadata is lost, version history disappears, and permissions do not map correctly. Your team spends weeks in post-migration cleanup, and users lose trust in the new environment.
Why Is Pilot Testing One of the Most Important SharePoint Migration Steps?
Of all the SharePoint migration steps, the pilot is the one that catches problems you could not predict from planning alone. Never migrate everything at once. A pilot lets you break things before everyone depends on the new environment.
Select a representative site. Pick a department that uses a mix of file types, permission levels, workflows, and external sharing. The goal is to stress-test the migration under realistic conditions.
Validate everything. After the pilot, compare source and destination: item counts, file sizes, metadata accuracy, permission inheritance, and workflow function. Check search indexing. Test links. Have users perform their normal daily tasks and report issues.
Document every issue and its resolution. This documentation becomes your playbook for the full migration. It also becomes evidence for compliance reviews that you tested before going live.
A Forrester TEI study on Microsoft 365 (February 2025) found that organizations switching to Microsoft 365 reported collaboration time savings of 1.5 hours per week per user. But those savings only materialize when the migration is done right. A sloppy pilot leads to a sloppy rollout, and users revert to workarounds instead of adopting the new platform.
How Should You Execute the Full Migration?
Execute in waves, not all at once. Each wave should be small enough that you can validate it fully before starting the next one.
Schedule during off-peak hours. Weekends and evenings reduce disruption. Coordinate across time zones if your organization has multiple offices.
Migrate in logical batches: by department, site collection, or priority level. If something goes wrong in wave 3, you can fix it without affecting waves 1 and 2.
Monitor in real time. Watch error logs, transfer speeds, and throttling alerts. Microsoft applies throttling to SharePoint Online to protect service performance. If you hit throttling limits, slow your migration rate rather than pushing through.
Communicate transparently with your team. Tell users what is happening, when it is happening, and where to find their files during each wave. Set up a dedicated support channel for migration questions. The number one driver of user frustration during migration is not technical failure — it is not knowing what is going on.
What Are the SharePoint Migration Steps After Data Transfer?
Post-migration validation is how you prove to your leadership, your auditors, and your users that the migration was successful. It is not a formality — it is a quality gate.
- Audit content integrity. Compare item counts, file sizes, and folder structures between source and destination. Look for missing files, broken links, and permission mismatches.
- Test search and navigation. If search does not return the right results, users will assume files are missing, even if they are not. Verify that search indexing is complete and that metadata is being picked up correctly.
- Run user acceptance testing. Ask business users to perform their daily tasks in the new environment and report any issues. This is your final quality check before decommissioning the old system.
- Document results for compliance. Create a migration completion report that records what was migrated, what was archived, what issues were found, and how they were resolved. For organizations in regulated industries, this documentation is often required for audits.
What Are SharePoint Migration Best Practices After Go-Live?
These SharePoint migration best practices protect your investment long after the data transfer is complete. The migration does not end when the last file moves.
Train your users on what changed. SharePoint Online works differently than file servers and older SharePoint versions. Cover document co-authoring, Teams integration, OneDrive sync, metadata search, and version history. When users feel confident, they adopt the platform. When they do not, they find workarounds that undermine your investment.
Monitor adoption using Microsoft 365 analytics. Track active users, site visits, and search patterns. If a department is not using the new environment, find out why and fix it. Do not assume adoption will happen on its own.
Schedule quarterly permission and governance audits. Permissions drift over time. People leave, roles change, and new sites are created without following governance rules. Quarterly audits prevent this from becoming a compliance issue. Reality Tech’s Records Management services can help you build an ongoing audit cadence.
Connect the migration to your Copilot roadmap. If your organization is planning to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot, your newly governed SharePoint environment is the foundation. Clean data, proper labels, and accurate permissions mean Copilot delivers reliable results. Messy data means Copilot becomes a liability. This is why the migration matters beyond just moving files.
Planning a SharePoint migration in 2026? Start with an assessment!
Reality Tech’s team will audit your current environment, flag compliance risks, identify redundant data driving up storage costs, and map a phased migration plan tailored to your organization.
We have done this for financial institutions, healthcare networks, law firms, and government agencies across the tri-state area and beyond, and we can do it for you.
Schedule Your Migration Assessment →
FAQs
The first step is always a thorough pre-migration audit. You need to catalog every site, library, list, document, workflow, permission, and customization in your current environment. This audit tells you what to migrate, what to archive, and what to delete. It also surfaces compatibility issues, like unsupported workflows or file path limits, that will cause failures if you discover them during migration instead of before. Start your audit with Microsoft’s SMAT tool, then work with a partner like Reality Tech to interpret the results and build your migration plan.
It depends on data volume, environment complexity, and how much cleanup is needed. A small organization with a few hundred gigabytes of clean data might finish in two to four weeks. A large enterprise with terabytes of content, complex permissions, custom workflows, and multiple source systems could take three to six months. The single biggest factor in the timeline is how much pre-migration cleanup you do, organizations that invest in cleanup before migration consistently finish faster. See Reality Tech’s complete migration guide for help estimating your timeline.
Yes, but there is no direct upgrade path. You will use a migration tool like SPMT or a third-party solution to move content. The critical thing to know is that several SharePoint 2013 features are not supported in SharePoint Online — including 2013 workflows, sandbox solutions, and some classic web parts. These need to be rebuilt using modern tools like Power Automate and the SharePoint Framework before or during migration. Reality Tech’s guide on SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint Online migration covers this in detail.
After July 14, 2026, Microsoft stops providing security patches for SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019. Your environment becomes increasingly vulnerable to security exploits over time. For organizations in regulated industries, running unsupported software can trigger audit findings, compliance penalties, and increased insurance premiums. The practical risk grows every month without patches. Start planning now — contact Reality Tech to assess your timeline and build a migration roadmap.
Start by documenting your regulatory requirements (HIPAA, SOX, FINRA, GDPR, etc.) during the planning phase. Audit sensitive data in your current environment and classify it. Design your target SharePoint environment with Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, retention policies, and data loss prevention rules configured before migration — not after. Test your compliance controls during the pilot migration. Document everything for audit purposes. If your internal team lacks compliance expertise in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Reality Tech’s Microsoft Compliance Purview services can help you design and implement a framework that satisfies regulators and protects your data.
Speakable
A successful SharePoint migration in 2026 requires a pre-migration audit, compliance planning, governance setup, pilot testing, phased execution, and post-migration validation. With SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 losing Microsoft support on July 14, 2026, organizations in regulated industries face added urgency to migrate now.
The SharePoint pre-migration checklist is the most critical phase of any migration project. It covers content inventory, permission audits, compliance mapping, and data cleanup — the steps that prevent data loss, broken workflows, and audit failures. 68% of organizations discover redundant data costing fifteen thousand dollars or more per year in storage fees only after migration.
Three deadlines are converging in 2026 that affect every organization running legacy SharePoint. Microsoft ends support for SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 on July 14, 2026, meaning no more security patches. SharePoint 2013 workflows and Add-ins retire from SharePoint Online on April 2, 2026. And Microsoft 365 Copilot requires clean, governed data to function safely.
The first step in a SharePoint migration checklist is always a thorough pre-migration audit. You need to catalog every site, library, list, document, workflow, permission, and customization in your current environment. This tells you what to migrate, what to archive, and what to delete.
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