Drupal Website Migration
Drupal Migrations & Upgrades
Get ready to transform your website with the latest release of Drupal 9
With the release of Drupal 9, your current CMS version might be outdated. As a trusted Drupal agency, our team will help you simplify the process, and make a smooth transition of your site to the most powerful version of Drupal, with little to no downtime.
Benefits of Migrating to Drupal 9
Moving older Drupal sites to D9 provides a much needed digital transformation and provides many benefits for those sites dealing with the challenges of a less robust CMS platform or an older unsupported version of Drupal.
The Last Big Migration
Drupal.org states Drupal 9 will ensure a continuous innovation cycle with new capabilities twice a year. Once you make this last big migration, future major updates will also be significantly easier (hours to days rather than weeks to months).
Still Using Drupal 6/7/8? It's Time to Upgrade!
If you're on an older version of Drupal, now is the time to upgrade (migrate) to Drupal 9. Your site's security is at risk, and its performance may degraded as a result. Our Drupal migration experts will perform a complimentary initial assessment of your site, and provide you guidance on how to upgrade your site.
If your site is running Drupal 6 or 7, a migration is the only way to get your website updated as an in-place upgrade is not possible. Successful upgrades take preparation, thus early planning is key to start this project.
Drupal 6 (EOL on February 24, 2016)
If you're currently running a Drupal 6 site, that version of Drupal is no longer supported, and your site is most likely vulnerable to hackers. If you aren't sure which version of Drupal you're currently running, please feel free to reach out to us and we will provide you a free assessment of your upgrade needs.
Drupal 7 (EOL November 2022)
Drupal 7 End of Life arrives November 2022, thus all D7 websites should move to Drupal 9 before that date. The architecture is vastly different from version D7 to D9, and it takes time to perform the upgrade.
Drupal 8 (EOL: November 2021)
Drupal 8 End of Life (EoL) arrives November 2021 because its Symfony 3 dependency. Our team can make sure your Drupal 8 site is ready to upgrade, and handle this project seamlessly for you. The upgrade is very straightforward from D8 to D9, and can typically be done in hours to days.
New Platform Migration + Redesign
Your migration is the perfect opportunity to revisit many parts of your website that are outdated or aren't working for your business anymore. A few reasons to consider a re-design would be adding more functional features, a visual re-design, updating user experience flows, data model, information architecture and/ or administrative content governance flows.
A redesign could simplify a CMS migration and will save you resources to build directly on Drupal 9 vs updating your old site and then migrating after.
Ask us anything about migrating to Drupal 9.
What does a migration involve?
Drupal Upgrades
For Drupal upgrades, we carefully scan all existing modules to both find out if they're being used, and determine if there's an upgrade path. Then we upgrade Drupal core, followed by one module at a time until the process is complete. The final step here is cleanup of any issues encountered during the upgrade, and in many cases re-applying some configuration that got lost in the process.
Our Drupal Migration Consulting specialists can carefully analyze your current website to uncover weak points, determine what version of Drupal to use (Drupal 7 or Drupal 8), and what modules need to be used, migrated or developed from scratch to get desired functionality.
Our team brings the high level skill sets you want working on such an essential project. Most importantly, we know the pitfalls to avoid—learned through hard-won experience—to keep your project on budget and on schedule.
We’re working on transitioning all our Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 clients to Drupal 9 well ahead of the cutoff date. This brings everyone peace of mind, and let’s us budget plenty of time for testing and new feature implementations, as needed.
Migration from a different CMS
At Webdrips, we've handled complete website migrations, from various different platforms to Drupal because of the transformative features & robust nature.
Converting from an HTML-based website to a Drupal CMS-based site is typically very straightforward, and involves the following process:
- Review your current site and map all the various content areas and sections into the field and entity equivalent in Drupal.
- (Optional) Identify a content tagging hierarchy so that tagging may be applied during migration, even if it's not immediately put to use.
- Identify all of your current dynamic content, and decide how to best convert it to follow Drupal best practices.
- Determine if there's any new functionality that may be added out of box or with minimal additional effort. For example, Drupal provides RSS feeds out-of-box.
- Next we'll find a base theme that most closely matches the current skin of your website, yet also will allow for future enhancements and compatibility with up-and-coming specifications like HTML5 and CSS3.
- Migrate the static content. This can be completely manual or completely automated, depending on the number of pages among other factors.
- Sign-off on the data model: are all the page types and fields in place and configured properly? Are images and files placed in the proper directory (folder) on the server? Does the content editor workflow meet expectations? Typically this is straightforward when converting an HTML-based sight to CMS because existing workflows and configurations were not in place to begin with.
- "Drupalize" the code for displaying existing dynamic content.
- Apply the theme (skin) to the static/dynamic content.
- Final signoff that static and dynamic content are displaying the same (or better) than the old site.
All of the other migrations discussed below include most/all of the above steps (except for Ubercart to Drupal Commerce migrations, but the overall concepts are the same).
Get more flexibility and speed by migrating from Joomla, Magento, WordPress, or any other open source or proprietary CMS to Drupal. No matter what CMS you are migrating from, our knowledgeable team of Drupal professionals will find a customized solution to ensure a seamless and easy migration process.
The process for converting an existing CMS to Drupal is essentially the same as the HTML to Drupal covered above. However, an in-depth study of the PHP code to display static or dynamic content and pull in related content is required. In addition, recreating and improving the content adding/editing workflow is typically required, as content editors expect a new CMS to be as intuitive as the old one.
This is another relatively painless migration with the aid of the Drupal WordPress Migrate module. We've used this module, and found the process relatively painless.
Next Steps
Preparation and planning are key
You can trust our team of Drupal experts to transition your site smoothly to the latest version of Drupal 9.
For over 12 years, we’ve been designing, building and supporting Drupal sites of all types, including large-scale migration and upgrade projects.
Contact usHow Webdrips Helps you as a Trusted Partner
Migrations don't have to be overwhelming. We are a knowledgeable agency that strives to simplify your migration process by understanding your organization.
Client Focused CMS Solutions
Drupal 9 Content tools empower Web teams to respond quickly to ever changing information needs. Other content management systems can be outdated, challenging and not always intuitive leading to very frustrating exchanges with your CMS. We believe in providing our clients with sound strategy, solutions and proper tools to manage their website with ease and expertise, from content updates, creating landing pages or content governance.
We center our CMS design around a component based architecture, so our clients can reuse design elements, features and functionality across multiple pages of a site.
For clients in sectors such as education, government and medical, there usually are multiple departments with dispersed sites. We help clients bring all these sites into one cohesive global brand providing the architecture to allow easy additions of new departmental sites.
Free Initial Consultation: Ready to Move your Project Forward?
We provide Drupal site upgrades & migrations, security & maintenance, eCommerce solutions, and design refreshes.