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.

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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

When businesses come to us for Drupal to WordPress.

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 across in a Drupal to WordPress migration.

Scope your migration ↗︎

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

The Drupal specifics

What our Drupal to WordPress work covers.

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 Drupal to WordPress migration 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.

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

Cost and timeline

What a Drupal to WordPress migration costs, and what moves the number.

The full WordPress cost breakdown ↗︎

Two quotes for the same Drupal site can differ by several thousand, and the spread is rarely padding — it is usually that the two firms read the job differently. Rather than publish one figure that would be wrong for most sites, here is what actually moves the number.

How many content types and fields there are

Drupal sites are usually modelled properly, which is good news and the main driver of the price. Each content type becomes a WordPress post type with its fields, and the count of those — not the page count — is what the work scales with.

How much the site depends on Views

Views are Drupal's quiet workhorse. Every listing, feed and block built from one has to be rebuilt as a WordPress query. Sites that lean on Views heavily take longer, and the dependency is easy to under-read from the front end.

Taxonomy and users

Vocabularies, term hierarchies and user roles map cleanly in principle and need checking in practice. Large editorial teams with real permission structures are more work than a site with three administrators.

Modules with no direct equivalent

Most contributed modules have a WordPress answer; a few have none, and those need a decision — replace, rebuild or drop. Finding them during the audit rather than during the build is what keeps the number stable.

How much URL history you are carrying

Drupal path aliases and pathauto patterns need an explicit map to WordPress permalinks. On a site that has been running for a decade, this is a genuine piece of the project rather than an afterthought.

Questions

Drupal to WordPress questions, answered plainly.

If your Drupal to WordPress question is not covered here, send us the details and we will 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.

How does a Drupal to WordPress migration handle content types?

Drupal content types map to WordPress custom post types, and fields map to custom fields. The mapping is the design work; the transfer itself is mechanical once it is agreed.

The platform itself is documented at wordpress.org.

Can we keep our URLs?

Usually yes, and it is the safest option. Where a path has to change, it gets a permanent redirect and the internal links are updated to point at the new URL directly.