Migration · Drupal → WordPress

Drupal to WordPress complexity translated properly.

Drupal is powerful and expensive to live with: developer scarcity, upgrade cliffs between major versions, and editorial workflows only a developer can love. WordPress covers the same ground with a far larger ecosystem and editors your team will actually enjoy. The craft is translating Drupal’s structures — not flattening them.

Get a migration plan See the gotchas
  • Content types and fields mapped to custom post types and meta — structure preserved
  • Views rebuilt as queries, blocks and templates that editors can manage
  • Path aliases inventoried and 301-redirected — long-standing SEO kept

Why switch

Why people leave Drupal.

Upgrade cliffs

Major Drupal upgrades are effectively re-platforming projects. WordPress upgrades are routine maintenance.

Developer scarcity

Drupal talent is rarer and pricier every year. The WordPress talent pool is the largest in the CMS world.

Editor hostility

Teams under-publish because editing Drupal is a chore. The block editor removes the excuse.

Cost of standing still

Modules lag, patches pile up, and the maintenance bill grows even when the site does not change.

What moves

What comes with you, and how.

Scope your migration ↗︎
  1. Content types → custom post types, with fields mapped to native meta or ACF
  2. Taxonomies → WordPress taxonomies, hierarchies intact
  3. Nodes and revisions → posts/pages with authorship and dates preserved
  4. Users and roles → WordPress users with a sensible role mapping (passwords reset securely)
  5. Views → rebuilt as archive templates, queries and blocks
  6. Path aliases → full inventory, 301-redirected to the new permalink structure

The Drupal specifics

The gotchas we plan for.

Every platform has traps that generic migration checklists miss. These are the Drupal-specific ones — the difference between a clean move and a rescue job.

Views have no direct equivalent

Drupal Views are a query-builder UI; WordPress has no drop-in twin. Each important View is rebuilt deliberately — as an archive, a block, or a query — which is design work, not conversion work.

Field mapping is the real project

A Drupal site can have dozens of content types with dozens of fields each. The mapping document (what becomes a CPT, what becomes meta, what gets merged) is where migrations succeed or fail.

Multilingual needs a decision

Drupal’s core multilingual maps to WPML or Polylang — similar capability, different model. The translation structure must be decided before content moves, not after.

Path aliases hide everywhere

Years of Pathauto rules mean one node can have several live URLs. The redirect inventory has to come from the database, not from clicking around the site.

Custom modules need triage

Custom Drupal modules are PHP against Drupal APIs. Each one is re-scoped: a WordPress plugin equivalent, a rebuild, or retirement.

Process

How the move runs.

Our full process ↗︎

Every migration is a parallel build: your Drupal site keeps running while the new WordPress site is built and verified beside it. The switch is a planned window, not a leap.

  1. Audit and inventory. Content, URLs, rankings, integrations — everything that must survive gets listed before anything moves.
  2. Parallel build. The WordPress site is built and the data migrated on staging, while the live site trades on untouched.
  3. Verification. Content counts, redirect map, metadata parity, forms — checked against the inventory.
  4. Cutover. DNS switches in a low-traffic window; the old site stays reachable to us until everything is confirmed.
  5. Aftercare. We watch Search Console, 404s and the numbers for the following weeks and fix what the real world surfaces.

Questions

Drupal migration questions.

If your situation isn't covered here, send us the details and we'll reply with a straight answer.

Ask your question ↗︎
Can complex Drupal content structures survive the move?

Yes — that is the core of the job. Content types become custom post types, fields map to structured meta, and taxonomies carry over with their hierarchies. The structure is preserved deliberately through a mapping document we agree before anything moves, not flattened into generic pages.

What happens to our Views?

They are rebuilt, not converted — WordPress has no direct Views equivalent. Each listing or feed your site relies on is recreated as an archive template, a query, or a block. In practice most sites use a fraction of the Views they have accumulated, so this is also a healthy pruning.

Do our users and their passwords move?

Users, roles and content authorship move. Passwords do not — the hashing schemes differ — so accounts are migrated with a secure reset flow at launch. For sites with many contributors we stage the comms so nobody is surprised.

Our Drupal version is ancient. Is that a problem?

No — it is the usual case. We migrate from end-of-life Drupal versions regularly; content comes from the database, not from the admin UI, so the age of the install matters far less than the quality of the mapping.

Related

Where to next.

All migrations Every platform we move sites from, in one place. Custom Development CPTs, blocks and the structures Drupal content maps into. Redirects guide How years of aliases are preserved.