Migrating Drupal Site Into WordPress
Background:
The company was paying a third-party development firm to manage their site with Drupal. Having a developer-focused set up in the platform, there wasn’t a whole lot the company could manage on its own. They needed to pay for development service hours for things as simple as a phone number update. As the company grew, it became prohibitively expensive to pay a third party to manage content at this level. After pitching the benefits of WordPress and the hands-on capability of content management in that platform, the company decided to move forward with the project.
Process:
The website needed some updates to the theme, so I pulled color schemes, fonts, and logos from the company’s branding guidelines and got to work with my WordPress developers to create a base theme for the new site. Once our theme was set, we migrated all of the content from the old site into the new site by setting up each page with a single text-based block in Gutenberg. Keeping all the transferable styling in the text-based block, this kept pages looking similar to their originals until being optimized in the new setup.
Since the company needed to update the styling, we started a blank Elementor canvas for each page, creating templates for various sections and page types. The bulk of the project centered around this process, as there were over 1K pages in their site plan. Many pages were in blog format so we also took this opportunity to perform a content audit. Our audit found a large amount cornerstone pages within the blog that we decided to move into the main site plan and optimize within a new resources section.
Challenges:
While the project was relativity straight forward in what needed to be accomplished, along the way we ran into a few road blocks. The biggest of which was what we uncovered in the content audit, having almost 700 pages of material that needed pretty significant updates. Those updates required input from SMEs and quite a bit of technical writing. The solution we put in place made it possible to spend time on each, by keeping everything in the new site as it was in the old site until proper updates could be made.
Results:
The finished product gave the team the ability to efficiently manage website updates and organize content for an improved UX and future growth. In addition, the team was able to efficiently make changes we uncovered in the content audit which would have been far less efficient on the original platform.
Screenshots/Visuals:
Interested in a collaboration?
Reach out and let me know! I’m always happy to look at a project and see how I can help!