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Drupal migration

Drupal migration without losing your SEO

If you are moving your website to Drupal, or to a current version from Drupal 7, I prepare the migration so the pages that bring you visits today keep appearing on Google, whether you are in Valencia or anywhere else in Spain.

Tell me which website you're migrating

Every page on your website finds its new address on Drupal.

What’s specific to Drupal

What changes when your website moves to Drupal

In Drupal, URLs are decided by whoever configures it, so it pays to plan them from the start.

Without aliases, every page is /node/ plus a number: the Path module lets you give each page a readable address, such as /productos/tazas instead of /node/10. Core doesn’t create those aliases by itself, and Pathauto is used to generate them from a pattern.
Redirects live in a separate module: the Redirect module stores manual redirects and sends anyone who arrives through another URL to the canonical one. Together with Pathauto, it creates a redirect when an alias changes so that links don’t break.
404 errors can be logged: redirect 404 groups the requests that return an error and lets you create redirects from that list. In the weeks after the switch it is a very useful tool.
The sitemap is a module too: simple XML Sitemap generates multilingual sitemaps of content, views and custom links. I configure it so it only includes what it should.
Drupal 7 no longer has security support: support ended on 5 January 2025. If your website is still on that version, I treat the jump to a current one as a migration, with its own crawl and redirect map.

How I work

The three phases of the migration

On Drupal, aliases and redirects are configured before the website opens.

Before the migration

Defining the scope: moving to Drupal usually comes with a new content architecture, with content types, taxonomies and sometimes several languages. Each change carries its own risks, and together they get more complicated, so I first put in writing what changes and what doesn’t.
Benchmark of the current situation: I analyse Search Console with at least 12 to 16 months of performance by page and by query, Analytics, the rankings of the keywords that bring you enquiries, Core Web Vitals and inbound links. This is the snapshot we will compare everything against afterwards.
Full crawl of the current website: with Screaming Frog or a similar tool I extract every URL, status code, title, meta description, canonical, hreflang, internal link and click depth. On a large website, old pages, duplicate aliases, PDFs and language versions turn up that nobody remembered.
Redirect map: old URL and new URL, one by one, starting with those that bring in traffic or have links. Nothing gets sent to the home page wholesale. Anything without an equivalent goes to the nearest page or is marked as removed with a 410. The map is tested before the switchover day and loaded into the Redirect module or onto the server.
Review before opening: while it is being built, the new website is in a staging environment closed to Google. I review templates, URL aliases, canonicals, structured data, speed and languages, check that no internal links point to old addresses and make sure the sitemap lists the new ones.
Plan and timeline: I choose a date outside your busiest periods, with developers available on the switchover day and the days after, and with a rollback plan in case something goes wrong.

Migration day

I check in production that the 301s work, with no chains or loops, using a large sample of the map before and after the switch. On Drupal I also check that every page has its alias and that the /node/ addresses lead to it.
I crawl the new website and the list of old URLs to confirm their status codes.
I submit the new sitemap to Search Console. If the domain changes, I verify the new property and use the Change of Address tool.

After the migration

Daily monitoring for the first two weeks: indexing in Search Console, 404 and 5xx errors, rankings for the benchmark keywords and organic traffic by content type. To see what Googlebot is crawling I use the Crawl Stats report in Search Console.
I update the external links you control, such as profiles, directories, institutions or partners, and request changes to the most important links pointing to your website.
I compare against the benchmark at 2, 4, 8 and 12 weeks. A temporary drop is normal, but if it still hasn’t recovered after two months, the cause needs to be found.

Before we start

What I can’t guarantee

That traffic will stay stable. After the switch there are a few weeks of fluctuation, and what I can do is shorten the drop and make sure no content or links are lost.
An exact recovery date. It depends on how many URLs change, the size of the website and how quickly Google recrawls it.
That Drupal will rank better on its own. SEO on Drupal depends on how its modules and content are configured.

Questions

Frequently asked questions about migrating to Drupal

It can, because the theme, the modules and often the URLs change. I treat it like any other migration.

If they are migrated along with the content and use the same pattern, many addresses can stay the same. I check this URL by URL with the crawl of the old website.

At a minimum, aliases with Pathauto, redirects with Redirect and a sitemap module such as Simple XML Sitemap. I leave them configured with the development team before the website opens.

Yes. Drupal websites usually have a technical team behind them, and as an SEO consultant in Valencia I coordinate with them from the moment the content types are defined until switchover day.

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