Are you ready to migrate your CMS to Drupal? The Drupal migration process removes the burden of complex migrations, with enhanced flexibility and robust site architecture that lets you relaunch better, optimized digital experiences fast. We'll break down the best practices for performing your own Drupal migration, so you can keep your content and your sanity.
Generally, migration plans fall into three categories: enhancing your existing CMS experience AKA 'Lift and Shift', a complete reinventing of your site experience or an incremental migration process.
A thorough content/feature audit will help you decide which strategy is best for you. Some things to consider include:
This strategy is best suited for teams who want to keep their current site's branding and feature set while updating their CMS experience in terms of performance, speed and security. Your first step is to audit all your existing content on your source site.
Track all of your content in a centralized document, paying attention to the following concerns:
If you've decided to conduct a total brand overhaul and content refresh, Drupal offers a great opportunity to explore new content structures and design modern digital experiences. A reinvention requires everyone on both the front end and back end to play a part in the migration.
If your organization falls somewhere in between these two categories, you can conduct an incremental migration. Begin by migrating your simplest digital content first and later migrate any more complex components (such as e-commerce pages) in phases.
The next part of your migration involves mapping your current content model, ideating your future content model and assessing the overlaps and gaps.
To document the content model you create, Acquia recommends the Drupal Spec Tool which helps developers capture Drupal specific architecture details in their content and generates automated tests for these specs.
Once you define your content models, you need to map where that existing content will live in your new Drupal site. A major benefit of Drupal is its strong data modeling capabilities which allow you to break down the information that you need to store into individual fields and group them in content types. You may also want to leverage default behavior provided by entities like nodes, users and taxonomy terms.
Content mapping requires accessing all content in your legacy database and exporting it to the new CMS. There are numerous ways to accomplish this:
Oftentimes a piece of content has references to other elements on your site (i.e. taxonomy, images, users, etc). Drupal best practices recommend migrating these content dependencies by writing one migration definition for each entity then specifying the relationship that exists between them. Here are some ways to create a successful content map:
Once your content model and mapping are completed, you've conquered the bulk of the migration preparation and can now begin developing your migration scripts. Next comes phase two: testing, execution and optimization.
To see how to launch and optimize a successful Drupal migration, download Acquia's e-book: Why It's Time to Migrate to Drupal.
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Fri Sep 12 2025 09:10:53 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)