So you’re sold on the many advantages of WordPress over Drupal and you’re ready to wrangle the migration and come to the greener pastures of WordPress. What do you need consider?
Before You Start
- Survey your hosting environment. Because you are using Drupal, you already have a provider and a domain. But is that provider optimized for a WordPress site? Consider switching your host to one that is optimized to host WordPress sites.
Managed WordPress hosting services are faster, more security, include expert support and daily backups, provide automatic updates with no downtime, and provide development tools that you can use to manage your environments and versions.
Don’t skimp on the cost of the hosting provider you select. In most cases you get what you pay for.
- Install WordPress on your web server.
- Collect required credentials, such as your Drupal user name, password, hostname, and database name and prefix.
Step 1: Formulate and execute a migration strategy
There are a variety of ways to migrate content from a Drupal site to WordPress. However, if you would like premium service without the headache, you can partner with WordHerd to assist you with the migration process. WordHerd specializes in helping organizations transition from any CMS platform to WordPress.
WordHerd:
- Guarantees 100% satisfied.
- Provides a seamless transition from Drupal to WordPress.
- Delivers an exact match mirror copy of the existing look and feel.
- Migrates SEO elements such page title tags, descriptions, image alt tags, and markup.
- Includes 301 redirects.
- Includes SSL Certification if WordHerd hosts your site.
- Premium Litespeed hosting for WordPress on Corral.
Step 2: Inventory your Drupal site’s URLs
Create a master list of URLs with content that you want to migrate to WordPress. Now’s the time to ensure that your URLs are SEO-friendly.
If your Drupal site has a sitemap, make a copy of all page and post URLs. You can use Excel to track and manage them for the migration.
Step 3: Design a theme for the new WordPress site
Establishing the look and feel of your site is one of the most important areas to consider. WordHerd offers custom theme development and theme matching that goes above and beyond any off-the-shelf theme you can apply. Our clients who take the time now to make custom user interface design decisions reap the benefits of higher user engagement and conversions.
Step 4: Plan your site structure
The site structure that you develop with WordHerd determines the grouping, labeling, and navigation menu layout of your site’s content. Although optional, WordHerd highly recommends revisiting the structure of your site.
It is important to consider the structure of your site because the structure impacts a search engine’s ability to easily crawl and index your site, Google ranking, and the overall experience of your users as they navigate the content.
Here is an illustration of what proper site hierarchy should look like:
Step 5: Identify and install plugins and recreate forms
Rely on WordHerd to conduct a complete audit of all WordPress plugins. This step also involves manually recreating any forms used on the site.
Step 6: Secure your site and revisit SEO
Because you have moved all of your content to a new platform located on a new server, take the time to explore additional ways of securing your site.
You should also revisit Search Engine Optimization (SEO). WordPress generates code that follows SEO best practices. As a result, WordPress sites tend to rank well on Google. In addition, WordPress includes SEO-specific features that enable you to customize meta-data for each page to help increase site load speed and makes your site’s pages easy to find, index, and rank.
WordHerd is here to help
WordHerd specializes in migrating content from Drupal to WordPress. We will consult and partner with you through every step of the migration process.
WordHerd provides the following services:
- WordHerd will create a project plan that includes dates, time frames and milestones for the migration and theme creation.
- Content migration occurs in the background, while your current site continues to operate. Working closely with you, WordHerd ensures that all of the data from your current site is thoroughly exported to the new system.
- WordHerd links all content, media and images to the new WordPress website. Media and document and images are migrated to the media WordPress library.
- After the migration process is complete, the WordHerd Quality Assurance department tests your new site to ensure that it is operating as expected.
- At the specified date and time, we will seamlessly cut over to the new site and ensure that you experience no downtime for your business.
- Where required, 301 redirects are implemented to ensure SEO equity is retained.
- Post go-live WordHerd can maintain and manage WordPress websites for optimization and security.
Conclusion
If you are considering a migration from your current CMS to WordPress, please reach out to one of our Migration Specialists for a FREE consultation by calling 602-402-9035 or completing our brief quote form.
Start planning today, for a smooth transition tomorrow.