How to Migrate from Drupal to WordPress

Drupal has powered ambitious websites for years, but many organizations eventually decide the maintenance burden outweighs the flexibility. Every major-version jump — Drupal 7 to 8, 8 to 9, 9 to 10 — has meant costly rebuilds, and finding developers who know Drupal's module system, Twig templating, and PHP architecture is both hard and expensive. WordPress, by contrast, runs roughly 43% of the web, has a massive plugin and theme ecosystem, and a talent pool that keeps ongoing costs low.

Migrating from Drupal to WordPress is not a one-click job. The two platforms model content, users, and URLs very differently, so a careful plan protects your traffic and rankings. This guide walks through why businesses make the switch, what actually breaks during the move, and a concrete, ordered process for exporting content, rebuilding on WordPress, mapping redirects, and launching without tanking your SEO.

Why Businesses Migrate from Drupal to WordPress

The single biggest driver is total cost of ownership. Drupal's power comes with complexity: content types, views, taxonomies, and custom modules that often require a specialist to touch safely. When that developer moves on, small edits stall. WordPress lets marketing teams manage day-to-day content through a familiar block editor without engineering help.

• Lower ongoing costs: WordPress developers are more plentiful and typically bill less than Drupal specialists, and the Gutenberg editor reduces reliance on developers for routine updates.
• Faster feature delivery: Need a form, membership area, or e-commerce store? Plugins like Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, and MemberPress ship in hours rather than as custom Drupal modules.
• Painful version upgrades: Teams still stranded on Drupal 7 (end-of-life) or dreading the next major migration often decide that if a rebuild is unavoidable, they would rather rebuild on WordPress.
• Better content-team autonomy: Editors, SEO staff, and marketers can publish and optimize without filing developer tickets.

What Changes and What Breaks

Understanding the differences up front prevents nasty surprises. Drupal and WordPress store and structure content in fundamentally different ways, so almost nothing transfers verbatim.

• Content structure: Drupal content types and fields map imperfectly to WordPress. Basic pages and articles map to WordPress Pages and Posts, but custom content types usually need Custom Post Types (via a plugin like CPT UI or ACF) recreated by hand.
• Taxonomy: Drupal vocabularies and terms become WordPress categories and tags, or custom taxonomies. Term IDs change, so any hardcoded references break.
• URLs: Drupal often uses /node/123 or Pathauto aliases; WordPress uses its own permalink structure. Left unmanaged, every URL changes — the top cause of lost rankings in a migration.
• Design and templates: Twig templates and Drupal themes do not carry over. The front end is rebuilt as a WordPress theme, which is a chance to modernize the design.
• Modules and plugins: Drupal modules have no direct WordPress equivalents. You replace functionality (Webform → Gravity Forms, Commerce → WooCommerce, Views → query blocks or a plugin).
• Users and passwords: User accounts can migrate, but the two platforms hash passwords differently, so most users must reset their passwords after launch.

Any dynamic or gated functionality — member portals, custom dashboards, integrations with a CRM or ERP — deserves special planning. If your Drupal site drives complex business logic, a rebuild is a good moment to consolidate it with custom website and CRM development rather than bolting on mismatched plugins.

Step 1: Audit and Export Your Drupal Content

Start with a full inventory. Export a complete list of every URL — crawl the live site with Screaming Frog and pull your Drupal url_alias table — and record each page's traffic and backlinks so you know what must be preserved.

• Extract content: Use the Drupal Migrate or a CSV/JSON export, query the database directly, or use a bridge like the FG Drupal to WordPress plugin, which reads the Drupal database and pushes nodes, users, taxonomies, and media into WordPress.
• Catalog content types: Document every content type and its fields so you can recreate them accurately in WordPress.
• Save your media: Copy the entire /sites/default/files directory. Images and documents must be re-linked to WordPress's /wp-content/uploads/ paths.
• Baseline your SEO: Export current titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, and rankings. Our website migration SEO checklist covers exactly what to capture before you touch anything.

Step 2: Set Up and Build the New WordPress Site

Stand up WordPress in a staging environment, never directly on the live domain. Recreate the information architecture before importing a single word.

• Recreate content types: Build Custom Post Types and fields (ACF is the common choice) to match your Drupal structure.
• Set permalinks intentionally: Under Settings → Permalinks, choose a structure that matches your old aliases as closely as possible — often /%postname%/ — to minimize the number of redirects needed.
• Rebuild the theme: Develop a custom theme or adapt a well-coded base to match (or improve) the Drupal design. Clean, fast, semantic markup is the goal — see our approach to website development.
• Install functional plugins: Replace Drupal modules with vetted WordPress equivalents, and add Yoast or Rank Math for on-page SEO control.

Step 3: Import Content and Recreate Functionality

With the structure ready, import the content and verify it methodically. Run the import into staging, then spot-check a representative sample of every content type — not just the homepage.

• Map fields carefully: Ensure Drupal fields land in the correct WordPress fields, including author, publish date, and taxonomy assignments.
• Fix internal links: Search body content for old /node/ references and hardcoded domain links and update them to the new structure.
• Re-point media: Confirm every image and PDF resolves; broken media is common when files move from Drupal's directory to wp-content/uploads.
• Rebuild forms and integrations: Recreate every Webform, and re-establish any CRM, email, or payment integrations, then test each one end to end.

For large or complex sites, a partner that runs professional website migration services can automate much of the content mapping and catch the edge cases that manual imports miss.

Step 4: Map 301 Redirects to Preserve SEO

This is the step that makes or breaks your rankings. Because URLs change between the two platforms, every old Drupal URL must 301-redirect to its new WordPress equivalent. A 301 tells Google the page moved permanently and passes the large majority of its link equity forward.

• Build a redirect map: Create a spreadsheet pairing each old URL with its new destination. Our 301 redirect map guide shows how to structure this at scale.
• Cover everything: Include /node/ID paths, old Pathauto aliases, paginated views, and any legacy URLs still earning traffic or backlinks.
• Implement the redirects: Use the Redirection plugin for smaller sites or server-level .htaccess/Nginx rules for large ones, which perform faster.
• Avoid redirect chains: Point old URLs directly to the final destination, not through intermediate hops, and never redirect everything to the homepage.
• Preserve meta data: Carry over each page's title tag, meta description, and canonical so on-page signals stay intact.

Step 5: Launch, Update DNS, and Test

Once staging is fully verified, plan the cutover for a low-traffic window. Keep the Drupal site available as a rollback until the new site is confirmed healthy.

• Point DNS: Update your A record or CNAME to the new host and lower TTL beforehand so the switch propagates quickly.
• Install SSL: Confirm HTTPS is active and that redirects force https://.
• Test redirects in bulk: Crawl your old URL list and verify each returns a single 301 to a live 200 page.
• Submit a new sitemap: Generate the WordPress XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console, then monitor the Coverage and Page Indexing reports for spikes in 404s.
• Watch analytics and rankings: Expect minor fluctuation for a few weeks; investigate quickly if you see sustained drops, which usually point to a missed redirect.

Timeline and Cost: A Realistic View

Timelines depend almost entirely on content volume and custom functionality. A small brochure site of 20–50 pages can move in 2–4 weeks. A mid-size site with several hundred pages, custom content types, and integrations typically runs 6–12 weeks. Large, application-heavy Drupal sites can take several months.

On cost, at an $80/hour rate, a straightforward migration often lands in the low-thousands, while complex projects with custom theme development, e-commerce, and CRM integration scale from there. The variables that move the number most are the count of content types, the number of URLs needing redirects, custom functionality to rebuild, and how clean the source Drupal data is. Investing in a proper redirect map and thorough testing is far cheaper than recovering lost organic traffic. If you want it handled correctly the first time, a specialized WordPress development company can scope the exact effort for your site.