Drupal to WordPress Migration: Background
In this section of the Drupal to WordPress Migration Guide, we'll gain some background understanding about why organisations are moving from Drupal's complex enterprise platform to WordPress's user-friendly system. We'll also explore the risks of migration failure, including traffic drops and cost overruns, along with common mistakes to avoid.
1. Why are Drupal users migrating to WordPress?
Many developers and site owners jumped on the Drupal bandwagon in the early 2000s. At that time it was the only real option for a content management system (CMS). Since then it has transformed into a platform more suited to enterprises, with a steep learning curve, demanding regular performance tuning and expensive hosting. Additionally, backward compatibility between versions has been a serious problem as major version upgrades essentially meant rebuilding the site from scratch. Rather than spend the resources needed to upgrade, site owners often choose to stay with aging, outdated sites that become prone to attacks. Those who decide to move from their current Drupal version often end up looking to migrate their sites to an different platform.
WordPress is an ideal alternative to Drupal for site maintainers with simpler requirements. It has a smaller footprint; user-friendly interface built-in; lower management overhead; and rich plugin ecosystem. There's also no shortage of WordPress guides to help you on your way and if you need someone to do the work, there are many developers with reasonable rates.
2. What can go wrong during a Drupal to WordPress migration?
Many migration guides, tools and services make the process seem so simple. If you can migrate your site from Drupal to WordPress in a few easy steps, how much can really go wrong?
Here's the best way to highlight the answer: run a web search with variants of the keywords site, migration and disaster. See how many results you get back.
From my experience, there are broadly two types of site migration failures: traffic drops and runaway costs. These failures have different results but the effect is the same. Everyone leaves regretting the entire endeavor.
Traffic drop
Traffic to the new site may plummet after migration. Usually this is due to failing to address the SEO impact of the changes. Sometimes it can be due to visitor dissatisfaction with the new design or overall user experience. The traffic drop may be permanent, destroying online revenue.
Runaway costs
The migration process itself ends up blowing away your budgetary estimates. Remember costs can mean both money and employee time. A seemingly cheap solution or improper planning could immerse multiple staff members in never-ending migration misery.
3. Common site migration mistakes
Site migration failures stem from the same root causes: inadequate planning and unrealistic expectations. This is why I will spend a lot of time talking about planning and understanding what's involved.
Be sure to avoid these top ten common migration mistakes:
- Poor planning (or not making any migration plans and contingency plans).
- Underestimating the scale and scope of the migration project.
- Bringing in key people too late into the project. (Do you need involvement from migration consultants; SEO consultants; developers; system administrators; testers; content editors; decision makers?)
- Using inexperienced migrators or developers.
- Rushing to launch. Is there a reason for picking that launch date? Is it realistic?
- Allowing excessive scope creep. Try not to tackle too much all at once.
- Failing to understand how the changes will impact your wider business. For example: How will traffic changes affect revenue projections? Will the user experience cause increased support requests? (Users include visitors, editors and maintainers.)
- Poorly communicating what's happening—and why it's happening—to everyone who needs to know.
- Not running pre and post-migration audits and benchmarks.
- Inadequate testing. For example, will that combination of new custom theme and plugins cause a performance drop on the live server?