After many, many years, I finally made the decision to move from Drupal to WordPress. I started using Drupal as my CMS of choice many, many years ago. I honestly can’t even remember how long it has been. When I initially chose it over WordPress, it was for two primary reasons.
- WordPress was still mostly a single-site blog platform
- The Drupal terminology of pages and books made a lot of sense to me, seeing as I was building sites for a library at the time
For all those years, I loved Drupal and the ability to easily make custom content types. Views gave me such an amazing ability to build out custom pages and forms, and I did so regularly. Things changed for me as the end-of-life date for Drupal 7 started getting closer, and I made the jump to Drupal 9. I can’t tell you how much I hated Drupal 9.
For one, the code base is GINORMOUS. I have a pretty basic, shared hosting plan since I’m only operating 2 relatively small, personal websites at this point. Upgrading to Drupal 9 started causing performance issues on my shared hosting plan. Additionally, upgrading Drupal core started taking FOREVER. With over 22,000 files that I had to upload over FTP, I would have to wait long periods of time to perform upgrades. The database became even larger. Finding attractive free themes became more difficult. And, with my distance from regular coding and technologies, trying to build my own themes was no longer a very practical option.
Making the Switch from Drupal to WordPress
With all that in mind, I finally decided to make the switch. I started with my husband’s website, and I couldn’t have been happier with how it went. His site has a lot of content, so manually recreating it wasn’t an option. Fortunately, I came across the FG Drupal to WordPress plugin, and it made the migration so easy. I bit the bullet and got the paid version, and it was worth every penny. We decided not to get all the add-on plugins, so there was still quite a bit of manual work to do, but it made things much easier than I could have hoped for.
Once I saw how much smaller his database and codebase were, I decided it was time to migrate this site, too. My site transfer was even easier! Plus, I was able to find easy, attractive, FREE themes that we both really liked for our sites.
I will admit, I had to abandon one piece of my Drupal site that I was working on behind the scenes because I lost Drupal Views functionality. I’m still hoping I might be able to replace that stuff, but it isn’t important enough to pay for the functionality in WordPress, which is the only option I have found so far.
Overall, though, I’m so happy that I made the switch. Drupal served me well for many years, but now I say goodbye to you, Drupal!
