Checklist For Migrating Your Existing Website To Drupal

If you are fed up of slow loading pages of your site and its inability to handle huge traffic, Drupal migration is one stop solution. This provides you an opportunity to shift your site to a different platform without developing a new site from the scratch. With the advanced Table Wizard and Migrate modules, the entire migration process is now relatively effortless. At present, Migrate modules and table wizard work with MySQL only. If your data is stored in any other database, you need to export it MySQL.

Consider The Following Things Before You Begin Migration

Identify the distinctions in your PHP installation on both the servers including features, bugs, modules, versions, configurations, etc. Also, document the same for Apache, MySQL or any of your alternatives.

Get an appropriate tool set & learn that how to utilize it to download & upload files, alter permissions and ownerships, manage compressed files, work with MySQL and others. However, there are a few Drupal tools that cover some of these aspects, like restoring the data or backing up, but still they do not cover everything. Certainly, you must use the tools that help in your case.

While moving from a superior host to a good host, things stop working. This might not be that the migration failed, but the destination was not set up right. Here is a checklist for migrating your website to a new platform that will definitely help you in Drupal migration.

The Things To Be Considered On The Existing Site

Document the employed modules with their versions and paths. The provided module Site Documentation can simplify this task for Drupal.

Set the website to maintenance mode in Administer > Site maintenance, set it to ‘offline’.

The temporary directory folder can be used in admin > settings > file-system or you can edit these settings after restoring the database. Make sure that the same path exists on both the websites.

Remove the data from the cache tables as they are unnecessary for transfer and may cause confusion, while cleaning the data. The admin menu module and devel module contain links that can simplify your task.

Copy the entire site code including themes & modules and download them, if required, or it is good to transfer them directly to the new server.

Similarly, copy the file directories, like image galleries, download them or transfer directly to the new server.

Things To Be Considered On The New Site

Upload the entire site code including modules & themes on the Drupal site or you may reconstruct from the fresh copies as per your preference.
Upload files directory and the similar directories to the desired location, while editing the .sql file.
Create an empty database for Drupal and name it. Upload & import the SQL data. If you are unable to create the database, you can utilize the tools on your host’s control panel or even take some professional assistance.

Check the status report through “reports” option under Administer and run Cron manually, if suggested by Drupal.

Your new website will now look and operate virtually similar to the previous one. You can change the theme or theme colors according to your needs.
Set the performance parameters according to your requirements through “Site Configuration” option under Administer.

Once everything is checked, turn off the site-maintenance mode.

Conclusion

Drupal allows you to make significant changes to your website requiring little to no coding. Due to its open source nature, a number of user-created plug-ins are available free of cost. Its expanding database shows significant rise in the count of people, who are migrating to Drupal from other platforms. Shifting a website to different platform is not an easy task. Therefore, it is essential to keep the above-mentioned things in mind, while migrating your website to Drupal.