Migrating off Drupal without losing your rankings

Most horror stories about migrations are really stories about redirects. The build was fine. The content came across. Then traffic fell by half and took eight months to recover.

We have moved corporate sites off Drupal onto headless setups, and the pattern that protects traffic is consistent.

Map the old site before you touch the new one

Crawl everything. Every URL, its status code, its traffic and its rankings. You need this while the old site is still live, because once it is gone you are guessing.

Sort the list by traffic. The top pages get individual attention. The long tail gets rules.

Every old URL needs a destination

One-to-one where the page still exists. To the closest equivalent where it does not. To a relevant parent where nothing matches.

What kills traffic is redirecting everything to the homepage. Search engines read it as the page being gone, and your rankings go with it.

A redirect map is not a technical detail. It is the single thing that decides whether traffic survives the move.

Keep the structure recognisable

If the URL pattern can stay, keep it. Every unnecessary change to structure is risk with no benefit. Change platform or change your information architecture, but avoid doing both at once unless the old structure is genuinely the problem.

Migrate content properly

Drupal content tends to arrive with a decade of embedded HTML, inline styles and broken references. Cleaning it during migration is worth the effort. Importing the mess is fast and you live with it for years.

Launch in a controlled way

• Compare crawls of old and new before switch-over.
• Verify analytics and Search Console on the new site on day one.
• Submit the new sitemap and keep the old redirect map in place indefinitely. Redirects are not temporary.
• Watch rankings weekly for a quarter. A dip in the first fortnight is normal. A dip in week eight is a problem to investigate.