Drupal migration to Contentful: Why it improves your websites and how to do it right

There was a time when traditional CMS platforms like Drupal and WordPress practically ran the internet, offering a solid foundation for creating content-driven websites.

However, with advancements in JavaScript frameworks, cloud-native infrastructure, and headless architectures, the tools that enabled the proliferation of blogs, online stores, and online communities no longer offer the value they once did for many use cases.

Technology has since progressed beyond the concepts behind monolithic architectures. Migrating from Drupal to Contentful can be a huge leap forward, especially for websites in need of an overhaul or upgrade to a newer version of the Drupal CMS platform.

Users can expect fast-loading content, developers get scalable infrastructure and SDKs (and don’t have to deal with a dreaded Drupal version migration), and your business realizes an increased ROI on your content by reusing it across multiple channels.

The challenges of Drupal for development teams

Drupal earned its popularity by providing development teams with a customizable framework for building content-rich websites, making it a good option for businesses that needed flexibility and control over their online presence. However, modern approaches to web development have highlighted some pain points with legacy content management systems.

Drupal was originally designed to power a single website from one CMS instance. Enabling it to serve content to more than one website is now possible but requires a contributed module that has been in beta for over nine months. This is limiting and, given the challenges in hosting content for more than one website, makes omnichannel using Drupal a non-starter.

As Drupal is open source, it’s entirely up to you to host infrastructure. While this level of control may seem like an advantage, you’re on the hook for ongoing maintenance and security — overheads that can quickly add up and force your developers to spend time patching servers and code rather than improving your product. 

Another problem with relying on Drupal for your online presence and content hosting is the dwindling community: You’re reliant on this for new feature updates and bug fixes, and if you run into any issues that need troubleshooting, you may find help is hard to come by compared with stronger open-source communities or commercial platforms with dedicated support teams.

Drupal usage has been consistently trending down since 2018, making skilled Drupal developers increasingly difficult to find (and it’s not likely to get any better, according to survey data). Now that Drupal 7 has reached end of life and requires a full site rebuild to upgrade to a newer version, many developers are encouraging stakeholders to let them migrate their Drupal websites and content to platforms that are more suitable for current and future use cases.

What makes Contentful the ideal content platform for your Drupal migration?

Moving to a new content platform isn’t just about getting rid of your old, insecure, or inefficient codebase: Your new system needs to fulfill all your previous requirements while enabling new opportunities, and you need to be able to move your existing content to the new system in an automated way.

Contentful is a complete content solution that integrates a headless CMS with a global content delivery network (CDN), content ideation and creation tools that can be customized to your workflows, and collaboration features. Editors and marketers benefit from Contentful’s intuitive UI, live preview capabilities, and personalization features. Developers can leverage the Contentful CLI or APIs to automate the migration of existing Drupal websites and leverage SDKs to build frontend apps, websites, and other clients.

A scalable, modern foundation

Contentful is a fully managed SaaS platform built to operate at scale, offering a global CDN, auto-scaling infrastructure, and built-in REST and GraphQL APIs. While teams using Drupal have to set up their own tools and infrastructure, Contentful offers everything as a fully managed service. 

… that future-proofs your web and content stack

Many development teams have had to spend time migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 — time that would have been better invested in improving their applications and expanding the reach of their products. It is a better long-term investment to spend the time needed for a Drupal 7 migration to a platform that is future proof and lets you build any kind of front end using modern JavaScript frameworks like React. 

Contentful puts you in full control of your content model and presentation: Choose any frontend framework or UI libraries, and connect using our JavaScript SDKs (or use our SDKs for other major languages and platforms).

Built for omnichannel and reuse

Drupal is monolithic and page-centric, tightly coupling content to presentation. Contentful, on the other hand, allows you to employ a composable architecture. You can integrate your CMS with the best tools (analytics platforms, commerce engines, AI) without creating content silos or relying on an all-in-one monolithic system. You can assemble the exact stack your business needs without being locked in.

Drupal’s approach also limits your ability to reuse content across different channels to maximize its value. Content hosted in Contentful is granular, remixable, and reusable. You can use the same content for your websites, emails, digital billboards, apps, AI assistants — practically anywhere your audience is.

Contentful also offers powerful collaboration tools, like its Visual Modeler, which allows you to define the structure and relationships of your content so that it can be parsed and displayed in any front end. (For example, your app may display content in one format, while the same content appears on your website in a different layout.) Additionally, Contentful supports programmatic content modeling for automated, large-scale use cases.

Teams can also configure layouts, permissions, and workflows to match how they work. The Contentful App Framework and Contentful Marketplace have pre-built and pre-approved apps, many of which are open source, allowing you to easily extend Contentful apps for SEO, localization, AI tools, and other functionality.

Compared with Drupal, Contentful offers more SEO flexibility (with a little extra configuration). There is a generative engine optimization (GEO) angle to consider here too: Your content must be clearly structured so that it can be accurately surfaced and relayed to users by AI-powered search engines and assistants. Contentful provides this, making sure your content is easy for AI to understand, even outside of its delivery context.

Drupal isn't as snappy for content creation and curation 

Drupal’s content editing interface has been described as cluttered and confusing for non-technical users. While it’s not impossible to make it user-friendly, this requires extensive configuration that involves adding additional modules, manually customizing WYSIWYG editors, and setting up custom views. 

Content-focused workflows in Drupal can also be slowed by server performance issues, caching misconfigurations, or database query inefficiencies. These performance delays when saving drafts, editing fields, or previewing changes can hobble content creators. Non-technical users may also struggle with buried or overly technical settings, which can slow editorial velocity.

How Contentful improves editorial workflows

Contentful is designed by content experts in consultation with our community of creators so that we’re always providing an intuitive and easy-to-use content platform that meets modern creative expectations and evolving content best practices.

Contentful makes it easy to optimize your editorial workflow in several key ways:

Live previews

The live preview feature lets content creators see exactly what the content they’re editing will look like in its final published form; live updates allow you to see changes in real time. There are no messy content staging processes, and it comes with the necessary governance tools for security, ensuring only authorized people can edit, review, and publish content — all while showing you what users will see when it’s finally published to your apps, websites, and other channels.

Personalization

Bringing personalized content experiences to your customers is critical for improving engagement, conversion, and customer retention. Drupal has no native support for this, and integrating third-party tools can be time consuming and requires complex infrastructure. Contentful supports native personalization and experimentation capabilities. You can integrate identity and behavioral data via APIs, and then adapt content based on audience segments and geolocation. Content creators can use Contentful to manage their personalized experiences without engineering support.

Integrations

Contentful provides a marketplace of ready-to-use apps, making it easy to integrate all of your business-critical tools. Many of these apps are open source, as are the development tools used to extend the platform (Forma 36 and field editors). This reduces development time spent building and maintaining integrations and can extend functionality, improving the editorial experience and, therefore, content velocity.

Workflow enhancements

Contentful offers flexible workflow tooling that fits around how your business likes to do things. This enables content creation, review, and publication processes that reflect the needs of your business rather than forcing you into any one way of working.

Omnichannel publishing

Contentful liberates your content by making it available to anything that can connect to the internet. In contrast, Drupal was created with the assumption that one Drupal instance will power one website. This makes it difficult to support experiences that power multiple websites or omnichannel experiences.

Unlock your content and realize its full value

Migrating to a new platform is an opportunity to clean it up and make sure that it’s not locked into an outdated structure that prevents its future use. Drupal’s reliance on single content blobs largely locks your content into it, while migrating to Contentful can free up each piece to be reused and repurposed.

Content modeling is the first step in the migration process, and it’s the best time to do this. Although it might be attractive to just map your data 1:1 from Drupal to Contentful, you should take time to examine concepts such as topics and assemblies and refactor your content model. This will help you break down your content into manageable and reusable components, setting your content up for future omnichannel use that offers a better ROI.

To do this, you’ll need to audit your content to check what still serves your audience, determine what sections are obsolete or low quality, and evaluate the current data structure so that you can plan your new content model with reusability and flexibility in mind.

How to migrate from Drupal to Contentful successfully

Once you have created your content model, you should perform a backend functionality audit to see if there are any modules you’re using in Drupal, such as analytics or AI, and find the equivalent in the Contentful Marketplace (or port your custom modules using the App Framework).

Plan and build your front end

One of the biggest advantages Contentful offers over traditional monolithic CMS systems like Drupal is composability. Instead of being locked into an all-in-one system, Contentful takes care of the back end and management interfaces for your app, which means you can choose the best frontend components and build an app that fits your use case and business needs.

This gives you more freedom and potentially better performance, as you can develop with any modern frontend framework you want (including React, Angular, and Vue) and have complete control to maintain clean, modular, and performant code. Drupal, on the other hand, allows you to control what is output on screen, but it limits your frontend tech stack and typically ties you to its theming system, and updates can also bring performance issues. Furthermore, with Contentful, you’re not locked into any one particular design — you’re free to redesign your websites and apps however and whenever you like.

Another key advantage of decoupling your front end from your CMS is flexibility in rendering strategies. Depending on your use case, a static frontend might be the best option. Static websites delivered via a CDN can be a great choice for content-heavy sites like marketing pages, blogs, documentation sites, and product landing pages. They offer faster loading times and improved SEO compared to dynamically rendered sites. Some great frameworks for building a static front end include Next.js, Astro, and Nuxt.js.

When you’re planning your front end, you should check for any interactive components in your existing Drupal site, such as forms or maps, so that you can make sure they’re properly implemented in your new website.

When implementing your front end, you can connect it to Contentful using our SDKs including JavaScript, Python, .NET and others, via REST and GraphQL APIs. Your data will be presented just as you modeled it, in a structured, easily consumed way that supports omnichannel delivery and lets you keep your presentation code separate to enable future app and UI updates.

Migrate your old Drupal data

The actual Drupal content migration to Contentful can be done using Drupal’s API to export your data in its current format. Depending on how you structure your new content model, not everything may map cleanly, so it’s important to understand your data and ensure everything is transformed correctly. You can do this with a custom script that does things like flattening nested fields, splitting text, and normalizing taxonomies.

One common challenge is migrating text formatted using HTML. HTML-formatted text is rigid and hard to repurpose for non-web channels, this is one of the reasons Contentful prefers a JSON-based rich text format, so we can make content highly reusable across any channel. To make this transition easier, Contentful provides and maintains a conversion library that helps transform HTML into structured rich text. 

Transformed data can then be uploaded using the Contentful Content Management API or the Contentful CLI. It’s important to note that the order of operations matters here: Contentful entries support relationships that can reference other entries, which must be created beforehand. For example, you would want to insert Authors before Blog Posts.

More automation and control over your content

If you’re stuck on an old version of Drupal, don’t make a lateral move to extract data out of Drupal and migrate to yet another monolith. Contentful offers a modern, future-friendly architecture that supports continuous growth, making both technical and business sense.

Not only does it give you the choice of how to build your front end to best meet your business needs and audience expectations, but automation and DevOps pipelines also become easier to implement with a clean API-first foundation. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) automate testing to make sure no breaking changes are introduced and automatically deploy changes upon completion. Contentful makes it easier to automate your content pipelines and deploy at enterprise scale.

You can also identify new value in existing content, remixing, repurposing, and refreshing it across different channels. What you initially published as a blog article could be a LinkedIn post or AI recommendation tomorrow, or the featured image from the post could be displayed on a billboard, all connected through Contentful. Breaking down your content into its elements gives each piece its own value.

Contentful is a modern content platform that’s proven to drive engagement 

Drupal migration to Contentful isn’t just a decision to replace your old tech stack — it’s also about unlocking the full potential of your content and reaching new audiences, as proven by our established users.

• Docusign transformed its content operations by migrating to Contentful. It used Contentful’s composable architecture and tools like live preview, AI Actions, and personalization to enable its creative teams to update content autonomously in minutes instead of the weeks it had previously taken. Docusign was also able to localize across 52 languages from a single platform. 

• TELUS previously managed its content across seven systems for over 30 digital properties, leading to major delays. It migrated and consolidated onto Contentful, which enabled centralized content management. The result was 30% faster page load times, 14% higher conversion rates, and dramatically improved go-to-market speed.

• BMW moved away from siloed CMSes that required heavy lifting just to update dealer websites. With Contentful, it launched a multi-site, composable solution that now serves over 160 dealerships, enabling consistency and local customization. Now local dealerships can inject their personality into content using Contentful’s fixed, flexible, and free models. This has resulted in a 47% increase in test drive bookings and 61% more contact submissions.

Contentful enhances content management, turning it into a collaborative and strategic process that continually adds value. Editors and marketers get tools that make content easier to preview, localize, personalize, and publish without having to rely on developers, while developers can focus on building impactful features rather than having to maintain legacy infrastructure. On top of that, the SEO and GEO advantages are ever more vital in the modern battle for search relevance and AI discoverability.

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