Migrating your current Drupal website to Cloud Platform primarily involves moving the content into a new website. The following best practices ensure the smoothest possible transition from your current website to your new one:

• Assessing your content
• Considering assisted migration
• Using the Migrate module
• Importing your content

Assessing your content

Evaluating the content on your current website helps you to determine the scope of your migration. To decide whether you can perform the migration yourself or you need assistance, determine:

• the number of content types that need to be moved.
• the number of fields each content type contains and details about such fields.
• the number of comments on a content type.
• the number of items in each content type that needs to be switched over.
• the number of users that need to be switched to Drupal.
• the number of profile fields, associated with users, that need to be switched.
• the authentication method for users in the new website. For example, determine if the website uses Drupal native authentication or something else.
• the number of free-tagging vocabularies (sets of categories), besides tags, that need to be moved to Drupal.
• any other types of data that needs to be transitioned to Drupal. If applicable, include subscriptions, user points, badges, content ratings, private messages, user relationships (for example, following, friends), statistics, page views, and workflow. In addition, determine the number of items of each type and evaluate if there are types that are not mentioned here.

Considering assisted migration

Having a clear picture of your current website’s content helps you decide if you can perform the migration yourself or need guidance. Acquia offers migration services engagements to guide and assist teams with migrations on Cloud Platform. For more information, see Assisted migration engagement.

Using the Migrate module

The Migrate module is a flexible framework that allows you to migrate content into Drupal from other sources. This is an advanced module which is best suited for developers with object-oriented programming skills in PHP. It provides the infrastructure to manage large-scale, complex website migrations. If you aren’t comfortable using command-line tools, there are some modules that you can install along with Migrate. Those modules allow you to perform smaller migrations. For example, you can use the WordPress Migrate module to import WordPress content into Drupal.

Importing your content

After you decide a suitable method of content migration from your existing website, pick a date which is a few days before your website launches. Also, run a full import of your content to the to-be-production website. Ideally, your last migration before launch contains new and updated information. At the designated time, set your old website to read-only.

As you prepare to launch your new website, perform the tasks on the Checklist for migrating your website to Cloud Platform.