Drupal Migration Services.

While content migrations can often include many of the necessary elements to maintain a website’s SEO—such as meta tags and internal links—there are common challenges, particularly around content paths (i.e., the URI of individual pages). These issues are more likely to arise when migrating from non-Drupal systems, but can also result from content restructuring that's often part of a migration project.

For instance, when two or more pages are combined into a single new page, the original paths need to be redirected to the new consolidated path. Similarly, if the previous site used a custom build or a CMS with poor URL structure, you may need to preserve existing URLs or carefully redirect them to improved, SEO-friendly paths on the new site.

Drupal provides several tools to address these challenges effectively:

• Path module (core): Enables content creators to assign custom, user-friendly, and SEO-optimized paths/URIs to content.

• Pathauto module (contributed): Allows administrators to define rules for automatic URL generation. For example, all event content can follow a pattern like /event/[event-title], creating consistent, SEO-friendly paths.

• Redirect module (contributed): Automatically redirects old paths to updated ones—such as when a title changes. It also allows manual entry of redirects, which is particularly valuable during migration to ensure legacy paths don’t result in broken links.

In addition to URL management, other SEO essentials should be addressed during a migration:

• Ensure an XML sitemap is generated automatically.

• Configure a robots.txt file that respects the previous site’s setup while following current SEO best practices.

Together, these tools and practices help ensure that a Drupal migration preserves—and potentially improves—a site's search engine visibility.

All software goes through a lifecycle, which ends at a point known as end of life (EOL) where the software is no longer supported at a minimum, or no longer available.

Yes, and Drupal includes tools for enabling these migrations. (I believe we have other content on this topic)

The process extends all the way from discovery through to site launch, so in terms of start to finish it would be roughly the length of a rebuild and migration project. In terms of the amount of time spent in migration-related activities, that can range from days to a few weeks depending on the size of the website and the complexity of the content model. Migration also often includes manual migration, which obviously can take up a fair amount of the time.

This is the type of website we work on a lot to plan and implement content migrations. The planning process looks at the effort involved in migrating these complex data structures to identify which parts are economical to automated, while other parts may be better to migrate manually.

Newer versions include more modern approaches to website performance, security, and scalability, as well as using more current standards, tools, and methods. In addition, newer versions reduce the amount of “technical debt” - older code and features that are not well used or used at all - reducing the possibility of security vulnerabilities and functionality that can reduce website performance.

Absolutely! We regularly implement new integrations with a growing number of APIs, such as CRMs, payment gateways, or LMS platforms. We also have a robust process for reviewing custom modules, rebuilding functionality using Drupal core and contributed module functionality, and implementing any remaining functionality as custom code.