Drupal 7 to WordPress
migration guide

Site audit

• Structure: Analyze your Drupal website’s overall structure, including pages, menus, and content hierarchy.
• Content Types: Identify the different content types of content used on your site (e.g., posts, pages, products, events).
• Vocabulary: Understand how content is categorized and organized using tags, categories, and custom taxonomies.
• Content Inventory: Create a detailed inventory of all content, including titles, URLs, and publication dates.
• Site audit helps in mapping Drupal content types and taxonomies to their WordPress equivalents.
• You get a comprehensive overview of your website for complete content migration.
• Modules: List all active Drupal modules.
• Custom Code: Identify any custom modules or theme modifications.
• User Roles and Permissions: Document existing user roles and their associated permissions.
• Media Library: All media files (images, videos, documents) and their usage across the site.
• Forms: List all forms used across the site.
• URL Structure: Analyze the current URL patterns and any URL aliases/redirections.
• Performance Metrics: Gather baseline performance data (page load times, server response times, CWV).

Technical Assessment –

• Database Structure: Examine the Drupal database schema and any custom tables.
• Server Environment: Document current hosting setup, PHP version, and server configurations. (This will give a ballpark estimate of resources required for WordPress).
• Third-party Integrations: List all external services and APIs connected to the site, e.g., Google Analytics, or any 3P API. Multilingual Setup

User Experience and Design –

• Theme Analysis: Analyze the current theme structure, including any sub-themes or overrides.
• Responsive Design: Assess how the site handles different screen sizes and devices.
• Accessibility: Evaluate current accessibility features and compliance levels

SEO preservation

• Conduct a comprehensive SEO audit on your Drupal site.
• Discard any content and links not required or which is found to be deprecated.
• List your metadata and hierarchy of site architecture e.g., meta tags and XML sitemaps.
• Select a dedicated SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math for WordPress, which implements all the features existing on your Drupal site.
• Analytics: Identify installed analytics tools and any custom tracking implementations.
  

Drupal Site backup

• Utilize your hosting provider’s backup service.
• Use a Drupal backup module like “Backup and Migrate.”
• Manually export the database and files.
• Consider using version control systems, like Git (GitHub, GitLab), for code backups.
• Backup creates a safety net in case of unforeseen issues during migration.
• You can revert to the original Drupal site if necessary.
  

Backup components –

• Database: Full SQL dump of the Drupal database.
• Files: Complete copy of the Drupal file system, including themes, modules, and uploaded content.
• Configuration: Export of configuration files.

Backup frequency and retention –

• Perform a full backup immediately before starting the migration process.
• Set up incremental backups during the migration process to capture ongoing changes.
• Establish a retention policy for backups (e.g., keep daily backups for a week, weekly for a month).

Verification –

• Test the integrity of backups by performing a restore in a staging environment.
• Document the backup and restore process for team reference.

Security considerations –

• Encrypt sensitive backup data.
• Store backups in multiple secure locations, including off-site storage.
• Implement access controls to limit who can access the backups.

Remember:

• Store the backup securely in a separate location from the live site.
• Label backups clearly with date and site version information.
• Verify backups.