There’s no denying in the fact that Drupal and WordPress are continually competing against each other. There are loyal supporters for each CMS, some of them, however, opt for a shift from Drupal to WordPress framework, and vice versa.
Those who own a website, they know that regardless of the size and scale of the website, the impact it makes on the visitor matters a lot in defining the service attitude of their business. Website owners generally opt for CMS shift when they feel that their existing CMS is not fulfilling their requirements. In this article, we will discuss all the things that you need to know before migrating your website from Drupal to WordPress, and we will also know the steps to do so:
How to prepare for migration?
In a medical surgery, the doctor doesn’t start with the surgical procedure at once, as he does some necessary tests and preparations for the same. Similarly, before you hire WordPress expert to do the migration job, you need to make sure of the following things:
- Prepare a backup: Simply put, you don’t want to lose your valuable data which can result in future difficulties, and that’s why it’s imperative to prepare the backup of your website.
- Differentiate between useful and outdated content: We already wrote about the backup thing, but you surely don’t need all of that old data which is there on your website. A right way is to prepare a spreadsheet for the same and decide what is to be kept and what is to be left.
- Set up a plan: All migration plans aren’t the same. Therefore it’s better to decide beforehand that what all you need to migrate, i.e. domain name, web-architecture, hosting, content, web interface, and so on.
- Preserve your SEO: There are services available to crawl your website and export the URLs to understand the website-architecture more easily. If website traffic is an essential parameter for you, then you may not want to lose on the SEO part.
- Pick the time for migration: Choose a time when you know it will not hamper your business much as the Drupal to WordPress migration takes a considerable amount of time.
Steps to migrate from Drupal to WordPress
If you are friendly with coding and web design, then you may not need to hire WordPress expert for the job, as the steps are quite simple. Let us understand the steps for successfully migrating from Drupal to WordPress platform:
Step 1: Check for the hosting provider
Before going ahead with the further steps, it is vital to check whether you have a hosting provider installed and whether the host supports WordPress installation. If there’s a thumbs-up, then we can proceed ahead, or otherwise, you need to get an appropriate hosting first.
Step 2: Install the Plugin
The plugin required to complete the said process is the FG Drupal site to WordPress plugin. It is an easy plugin, and most of the installation is covered under it. In case you want to migrate other things like comments, authors, or custom post types, then you will need a premium version. Therefore, you can start by searching the FG plugin, installing it, and finally activating it.
Step 3: Locate the parameters.
Now since you have installed the plugin, it’s time to locate a few parameters like username, password, host’s name, database’s name, and so on. After that, find the settings.php file and open it using your preferred editor to find out the parameters specified earlier.
Step 4: Import the content
To complete the import, you need to go to the WordPress dashboard and select tools. If the plugin is already there, then you will notice a Drupal option within the import menu. Once you click the importer button, a page will appear with the option to change the configuration settings, and that’s where you need to paste the data from the database parameter section.
Finally, you need to configure how the plugin will import into Drupal files and post summaries that are media-related. First, select the import summary and then on the content option, your Read More link will be imported, and you will get options to go ahead with the media import.
Final Word
Drupal and WordPress balance each other on various scales, but there are some user-specific features which are unique for each of them, and hence the users opt for Drupal to WordPress migration. It’s true that Drupal is becoming the choice for many developers, but when it comes to bringing out the return of investment for developers, clients, and agency, and then WordPress is the hero.
Finally, we may conclude with the fact that Drupal to WordPress migration is a simple task, which equips your website with new features and makes it easy to use.
