Safest Route to Get from Drupal to Wordpress

[Pixelwik]

Hi all,

I have a prospective client who currently has a Drupal 7 site and they are interested in converting it to Wordpress (or simply building it new in Wordpress) and changing CMS. They would like to update the look of their site to make it a little more modern, but they are very concerned about preserving their SEO and rank, etc so they plan to keep the structure and urls, etc. pretty identical to what they have now with only minor cosmetic changes for the moment.

I want to find the best and most economical route for them to take for a change like this.  If an actual conversion/migration is the way to go, then I also want to help them find a professional developer they can trust to do the job correctly as I am not a Drupal person.

I guess my question concerns what would be the safest and most economical route to preserve the SEO and rank, etc. that they have now?

1) Would that be an actual migration and conversion of their current site into a custom WP theme that's structured as closely as possible to the site currently?

2) Or, depending on the ultimate complexity of the site, would it be possible to leave out the step of migration altogether? Would there be huge cons or red flags to starting from scratch and manually building a custom WP theme while duplicating the architecture/links/urls, etc. as closely as possible to the current site? Anything else to be worried about if this is a possibility?

3) Or would you suggest some other way entirely?

Thank you so much in advance for any guidance or suggestions on this! They are really nice people and I just want to make sure they do this safely because they get a lot of business from their site and they are justified to worry.

[JohnSammon]

Hey there!

The three things that you'll need to be concerned with in preserving SEO:

1. URL structure

2. Architecture or site map

3. Content on indivdiual pages

If these are preserved (which I recommend), then you shouldn't have any SEO issues when you move it to WP. I would recommend a custom WP theme. You can preserve the design but you may want to see how you can modify it to be faster as Google just updated their PageSpeed tool: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

I hope that helps!

[Pixelwik]

Hi there,

Thank you so much for responding. When you say you would recommend a custom WP theme, do you mean with regard to the #1 or #2 route? If you could be so kind as to clarify I would be most appreciative. Thank you again!

[JohnSammon]

Hey!  I would go route #1.

[Pixelwik]

Thank you very much! Appreciate the advice!

Now, I'm hoping there's someone out there who can recommend a professional developer for Drupal to Wordpress work like this... I've had some good luck on certain things with UpWork but it would be nice to have a recommendation for something like this.

Thank you again everyone!

[JohnSammon]

Hey again! I would be happy to give you a recommendation - it may be something my firm can help you with too. Please reach out to me at john@sixthcitymarketing.com. Either way, I'll be happy to help you find someone. Thanks!

[impactpro]

Interested in an update to your question.