Learn how to execute a Drupal Migration with reliability and precision

We cannot treat a Drupal Migration as a simple technology upgrade. Over the years, the platform has evolved into a broad strategic operation that influences digital results, integration stability, governance, SEO, security, and long-term scalability.

Organizations operating in complex environments, high content volume, multiple workflows, and critical integrations must migrate with precision and rigorous planning to avoid compromising performance, indexing, and operational continuity.

As Drupal 7 reaches its end of life and Drupal 10 consolidates a modern technical foundation, the main challenge for teams is not merely upgrading; it’s migrating without loss, preserving digital assets, reducing risks, and elevating the platform to a new level of efficiency.

Talk to Drupal Migration specialists and receive a strategic assessment

What You Need to Know Before Planning Your Drupal Migration

Proper preparation is what separates successful migrations from operations that generate rework, traffic loss, and unexpected downtime. To plan your Drupal Migration, several points are essential:

• Drupal 7 End of Life: Without official support, the platform no longer receives security fixes. Legacy systems become increasingly vulnerable, incompatible with new libraries, and harder to maintain.
• Evolution of Drupal 10: Drupal 10’s technical maturity redefines performance, accessibility, modularity, editorial experience, and security standards. It runs on modern Symfony versions, uses CKEditor 5, and adopts continuous update cycles.
• Need for Architectural Review: Migration is the ideal moment to correct structural issues, consolidate content models, eliminate redundancies, and reorganize taxonomies.
• Infrastructure Compatible with Modern Requirements: Drupal 10 requires updated PHP versions, database engines, libraries, and server environments. Without these, migration is not feasible.
• SEO Preservation: Migration impacts URLs, metadata, and redirects. Without planning, a platform may lose years of organic authority.

These points sustain the entire project. Based on them, the most important phase begins: pre-migration. 

Read: Why a Drupal Agency Makes a Difference in Your Digital Project

1. Pre-Migration: The Most Important and Often Ignored Phase

Pre-migration is the foundation of the entire project. It defines the real scope, anticipates risks, maps dependencies, preserves SEO, designs the architecture, and guides every future decision. The most common error in problematic migrations is neglecting this phase or treating it as a short checklist. Pre-migration must be deep, systemic, and led by experienced specialists.

Below are the essential elements of this phase.

Module Audit: Compatibility with Drupal 10 and Safe Substitutions

Drupal’s module ecosystem is one of its greatest strengths. However, over the years, many modules became unmaintained, deprecated, replaced, absorbed by Core, or lost relevance. A complete audit must identify:

• Compatibility of installed modules with Drupal 10
• Module status within the community
• Native alternatives within modern Core
• Associated security risks
• Impact on editorial workflows and integrations
• Custom modules that must be rewritten
• Opportunities to simplify the stack
• Hidden or poorly documented dependencies
• Modules that can be replaced by design system components or custom APIs
• Features that may evolve into decoupled architectures

In complex projects, this audit prevents the migration process from being blocked by incompatible modules or abandoned dependencies. It identifies in advance which components must be rewritten, which can be replaced with native Drupal 10 solutions, and which can evolve into a decoupled architecture, where Drupal exposes content via APIs to independent front-end interfaces. 

This evaluation reduces rework, prevents emergency rebuilds during development, and decreases long-term operational costs. Modernized modules operate using current Drupal and Symfony standards, become more predictable in testing, follow stronger security practices, and align with Core’s continuous update flow, extending the platform’s lifespan.

Content Architecture: Rethink to Scale

Content architecture is one of the central pillars of any migration. It determines how content is created, maintained, retrieved, migrated, and related. A well-planned Drupal Migration uses this moment to correct historical issues, consolidate structures, and reorganize editorial logic.

The analysis must include:

• Inventory of all content types
• Evaluation of fields, formats, relationships, and dependencies
• Review of taxonomies and hierarchical structures
• Removal of redundancies accumulated over time
• Consolidation of similar content types
• Standardization of naming conventions
• Preparation for headless or semi-decoupled integrations
• Alignment with accessibility guidelines
• Modeling of an ecosystem prepared for years of growth

Example: A portal that has eight different content types for publications (articles, news, bulletins, updates, notices, releases, etc.) can consolidate everything into two versatile content types, adjusting taxonomies and fields for flexibility. This reduces editorial errors, improves governance, facilitates migration, and increases performance.

See also: Web Design Companies for Effective Digital Presence

Technical SEO: Ensuring Nothing Gets Lost Along the Way

SEO is one of the most sensitive elements of a Drupal Migration. URLs, metadata, headings, structured markup, and sitemaps must be preserved with maximum precision. Platforms that ignore this step face traffic drops and authority loss.

SEO evaluation must include:

• Complete inventory of indexed URLs
• Performance and backlink analysis
• Preservation of titles, descriptions, and headings
• Review of navigation structure
• Maintenance of breadcrumb logic
• Mapping equivalence between old and new URLs
• Creation of a full 301 redirect set
• Analysis of pages with the highest traffic and authority
• Review of canonical tags
• Comparative crawling before and after migration

Common Issues Table

Tips to avoid SEO loss during migration:

Keep the current URL structure whenever possible, preserve 100% of metadata before transferring anything, apply 301 redirects while monitoring site behavior before and after launch, generate a new sitemap only after validating the entire environment, use crawling tools to monitor page behavior, and track Search Console daily for the first weeks to make quick adjustments.

Ask your questions about SEO retention in complex Drupal Migrations

2. Core, Environment, and Infrastructure Update

Migration only moves forward when the infrastructure and Core are fully prepared for Drupal 10. This stage ensures stability, compatibility, and performance.

Critical points include:

Updated Environment

Drupal 10 requires modern PHP, updated databases, support for new JS libraries, and modern security standards. Updates to servers, caching systems, and CDNs are essential for performance.

Complete Core Update

Includes revision of themes, components, libraries, accessibility, integrations, CKEditor 5, and compliance with modern security policies.

Adoption of CI/CD Pipelines

Automating tests, linting, audits, and deployments reduces risks, improves quality, and guarantees predictable cycles.

Observability and Advanced Logs

Infrastructure modernization includes telemetry, metrics, error tracing, and event monitoring.

Talk to a specialist and receive an assessment of your environment

3. Data Migration with Migration API

The Migration API is Drupal’s official and most powerful tool for transferring data safely, structurally, and auditably. It allows precise mapping rules, custom transformations, and integrity validation at every step.

An efficient migration includes:

An efficient migration includes:

• Templates for each entity
• Data normalization and cleanup
• Incremental migration to prevent data loss
• Reconciliation between the migrated and original data
• Detailed logs for each batch
• Automated reprocessing in case of failure
• Validation of complex entity relationships
• File migration with rewritten paths where needed

This approach prevents loss, duplication, inconsistencies, and silent errors, especially in platforms with large content volumes.

Learn more about Architectural Innovation and Digital Experiences with Drupal Websites

4. Advanced QA Testing, Editorial Validation, and Performance

Testing is essential. After the technical migration, a complete verification phase ensures everything works as expected. Each stage directly impacts launch success.

Testing includes:

• Content Validation: Ensures everything migrated correctly, with no missing fields, formatting issues, broken relationships, or visual inconsistencies.
• Functional Regression Testing: Validation of modules, integrations, user permissions, editorial flows, dynamic pages, views, and components.
• Editorial Testing: The editorial team must validate usability in the new environment, CKEditor 5 behavior, previews, workflows, and access controls.
• Performance and Load Testing: Identifies bottlenecks, warms the cache, verifies behavior under heavy load, and ensures front-end and back-end stability.
• Accessibility: Verification of labels, contrast, keyboard navigation, ARIA, and WCAG compliance.
• Post-Launch SEO: Full crawling, 301 verification, indexing checks, metadata review, and Search Console error analysis.

Migration quality depends directly on this phase.

Drupal Migration Scenarios

Understanding the complexity of a Drupal Migration requires acknowledging that no project starts from the same point. Each platform carries a unique history of technical decisions, installed modules, content models, integrations, data volume, and SEO strategies. These elements create different contexts that directly impact scope, risks, and timing.

After analyzing dozens of migrations in corporate, governmental, and high-demand editorial environments, it becomes clear that success depends not only on technical updates but also on the ability to accurately map the organization’s scenario.

This diagnosis guides planning, prevents rushed decisions, anticipates bottlenecks, and directs resources where they truly matter. The table below highlights the most common Drupal Migration scenarios, showing complexities, risks, SEO concerns, timeline impact, and key success factors. It helps readers quickly identify which scenario resembles their environment and what strategies are required for a stable, high-performance migration.

Count on Dexa to Lead Your Drupal Migration

When selecting a migration partner, organizations look for technical precision, reliability, transparency, and a high level of specialization to handle complex environments. Dexa stands out by combining modern engineering, strategic SEO, information architecture, UX, and governance in a unified and mature process.

This results in a deep, risk-oriented pre-migration, a complete audit of architecture and module stacks, a solid SEO strategy with authority preservation, specialized engineering in Drupal and Symfony, strong QA and performance pipelines, post-launch monitoring, and a product-oriented vision that prepares the platform for sustainable evolution.

Talk to Drupal Migration specialists and receive a strategic assessment!

Full FAQ About Drupal Migration