SPMT Not Retaining Content Types During Migration to SharePoint Online

Question

Running the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) to migrate from SharePoint 2016 on-premise to SharePoint Online. During the migration of a large list with 5 different content types, all rows appear in SharePoint Online as a single content type. Is there a known issue or setting to ensure content types are preserved during migration?

Answer 1

SPMT is not always able to correctly migrate complex content types or large lists. If a list contains multiple content types and has a complex structure, SPMT may merge these content types into a default type, causing the migrated data to lose the original content type information.

Site content types include various columns (list columns or site columns) and various site settings.

If you want to use SharePoint Migration Tool to migrate a large list with five content types from SharePoint 2016 on-premises to SharePoint Online, before migration, you need to ensure that the target list in the SharePoint online has enabled content types consistent with the source system. If the content type settings of the target site are inconsistent with the source site, SPMT may not be able to correctly map and retain these content types. You can manually add the content types of the source site in the list settings.

Or you could consider migrating a whole site collection to ensure that content types are migrated normally.

Make sure you are using the latest version of SPMT, as updates to the tool may fix some known issues or add support for complex content types.

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.