Migrating Government Sites to Drupal

There are so many great reasons to move your government website from a dated or restricted proprietary CMS to the open-source power of Drupal.

Perhaps you are trying to get away from annual licensing fees. Maybe you were attracted to Drupal’s flexible architecture, accessibility and security. Or you were simply told from your boss you need to move to Drupal!

Whatever the reason, we think you’ll find the grass is greener on the Drupal side. But before you can start, you need to get all those pages and files out of your current site and into Drupal. In other words, a migration. That’s where we can help.

Step 1: Planning

You may think of migration as purely a technical problem to solve. How do we get all of those images, documents, pages, and site features out of one system and into another?

That is a big part of it. But first, let’s start with some planning and discovery.

Content First

Oftentimes a government agency will have hundreds, if not thousands, of “legacy” files and pages that have built up over the past 5-10+ years. These may still be valuable to your team and your audience. But how do you know?

Chances are, even with the best run site, there is content that’s either not being viewed, no longer relevant, messy or inaccessible, or all of the above.?For these reasons, we recommend starting with a content inventory and audit.

Make a big spreadsheet cataloging all of your site content. This is your content inventory. There are robots and services to help get us started by crawling your existing site, and this is a process we can assist with.

Next, let’s compare that list against site analytics. What’s getting the most traffic? What’s getting none? Where do we want people to go? This can be a large-scale effort, depending on the size of your site, but one that will pay off in the long run.

Technically could simply migrate every file from your current system into Drupal. But first ask yourself if that’s a good idea.

There’s a saying we’ve all heard - garbage in, garbage out. Migration is an opportunity to clean out your content closets, and rid yourself of all the clutter. This could mean deleting or unpublishing content, rewriting content to be more effective (shorter or longer), or moving internally-focused content off to an intranet.

Audience and Goals

icon representing audience and goals

Let’s not forget who the site is for in the first place – your audience. That may seem like an obvious statement, but it’s very common for government sites to “lose their way” over time, with pressures from other departments, different leadership, new initiatives, and different goals, all leading to a site without a clear message and direction.

Migration is a technical process, but as with content, it’s an opportunity to re-evaluate what it is your site is doing and who it is meant to serve.

If possible, we recommend extending the planning and discovery process to revisit your mission statement, define your primary goals and outcomes, and consider what changes may be necessary. This could mean a revised sitemap and navigation, improved user pathways and journeys, tighter messaging on key landing pages, and a fresh new design.

Simply copying and pasting an entire site from an old system into Drupal is technically possible. But all of the discovery steps listed above (reviewing content, reviewing technical needs, reviewing audience and goals) are recommended building blocks to a successful migration to Drupal.

Technical Discovery and Build Planning

The next step in the process of migration is planning your new site build. Every CMS will include features to manage your content and support content editing. But a good CMS is also about structured data.

Through a technical discovery process, we would evaluate everything your current site does (in terms of features, content types, media, design, workflow, permissions, data integrations, etc.), and plan for its equivalent in Drupal. It’s very common to find ways to condense numerous content types into a smaller number, for example, or reducing the number of fields. These are important steps for the long-term health of your website. The fewer moving parts, the more sustainable the site, and easier it is to maintain and keep bug-free.

We’re certain Drupal can do whatever your last system did, and usually better. But we carefully plan the “how” along with the “why”. Coming out of this process is a documented plan for your new site build, so we can move forward with a clear “blueprint” on how to proceed.