Drupal to Contentful Migration

Move from Drupal to Contentful and replace legacy complexity with an API-first content platform built for faster publishing, reusable structured content, omnichannel delivery, and high-performing frontends.

Migration Without the Guesswork

Drupal’s enterprise complexity can slow teams down, increase risk, and divert resources from higher-value work.

Migrating to Contentful creates a more efficient operating model with stronger governance, reusable content, and streamlined localization—giving teams faster publishing workflows and greater consistency across markets.

It also reduces maintenance burden by replacing legacy overhead with a scalable, easier-to-manage content platform that supports long-term growth.

Why Migrate from Drupal?

# 1
Legacy publishing workflows slow teams down
# 2
Maintenance and patching consume too much developer time
# 3
Multisite and multilingual governance become harder to scale
# 4
Hosting, DevOps, and custom modules create ongoing overhead
# 5
Modern frontend teams need more flexible architecture

Signs it's time to move to Contentful

Client or technology partner logo

You need better structured content and reusable components

Drupal often starts to strain when content needs to be reused across journeys, governed at scale, or structured for omnichannel delivery. Moving to Contentful gives your team a cleaner content model, highly reusable components, and a governance layer that is much easier to manage as the site grows.

Green gradient concentric circles abstract icon

Your editors need real collaboration and faster approvals

Contentful gives editors and approvers a faster path from draft to sign-off. Teams can preview changes before they ship, review content in context, and reduce the heavy back-and-forth that slows down publishing in Drupal.

Green 3D geometric blocks icon arranged in a grid pattern

You are spending too much time maintaining the CMS

Drupal often becomes expensive to maintain because its monolithic architecture carries heavy backend overhead. Contentful reduces that burden with a cloud-native API-first setup: structured content, zero server maintenance, and no need to patch the platform every time a new vulnerability is found.

Client or technology partner logo

You need a frontend architecture that can move faster than Drupal allows

Gain true frontend flexibility, ensure faster content delivery, and get the freedom to integrate the modern APIs your team actually needs.

Representative Contentful Migration Outcome

60%
faster page publishing
faster campaign launch
100%
content managed by marketing
0
developer time for daily updates

Drupal vs. Contentful: a platform comparison

Heavy Server-Side Rendering:
Drupal relies on slow PHP processing and complex databases, requiring aggressive caching just to survive heavy traffic.
Next.js Edge Performance:
When you migrate from drupal to headless cms, content is pre-rendered via global CDNs for instant loads, flawless Core Web Vitals, and higher SEO rankings.
Rigid Twig Templating:
Simple layout changes require developers to modify complex Twig templates, severely slowing down marketing teams.
Composable Component Design:
Developers build React components once. Marketers then visually compose and publish pages independently, without waiting on dev sprints.
The Security Patch Treadmill:
A massive monolithic codebase makes Drupal a constant target for exploits, forcing DevOps into an endless, expensive cycle of urgent patching.
Zero-Surface Security:
Decoupling the presentation layer completely isolates your backend. Hosting Next.js on Vercel shrinks the attack surface and eliminates patch emergencies.
Painful Major Upgrades:
Moving between major Drupal versions is notoriously difficult, often demanding disruptive replatforming and manual database migrations.
Future-Proof API Architecture:
A migration from drupal to headless cms stores your content as clean JSON. You can easily swap frontend stacks years later without touching the core database.
Bloated Contrib Modules:
Adding modern features means stacking third-party PHP modules that frequently conflict, break during updates, and bloat the system.
Best-of-Breed Integrations:
API-first architecture lets you seamlessly connect modern services (like Algolia or CRMs) via lightweight TypeScript integrations, without polluting the CMS core.

How our Migration Works

01

Drupal content audit & migration assessment

We review your Drupal setup, understand your content types, and decide what needs to be moved or improved during migration.

02

Content model design for Contentful

We design and implement new content structures in headless CMS platforms—such as Sanity, Storyblok, Payload, or DatoCMS—to simplify publishing and give your team greater control.

03

Migration planning, scripts & QA

We build a faster, modern website using Next.js to improve performance, SEO, and long-term flexibility.

04

Frontend rebuild and API integration

We set up languages, regions, and publishing rules so international content is easy to manage.

05

SEO, governance, onboarding & launch

We train your team to use the new CMS and provide documentation so they can publish independently.

Our Clients Say

"FocusReactive has been an exceptional partner, delivering all our requirements ahead of schedule. Their team feels like an extension of ours, understanding our strategy and anticipating our needs. They helped us build two modern, SEO-friendly marketing websites that our marketing team can easily manage without relying on developers. The team is incredibly talented, responsive, and always takes pride in their work. Thanks to FocusReactive, we've been able to scale our marketing efforts more effectively. We couldn’t have asked for a better partner."

Mike Addonizio
Mike Addonizio
VP of Marketing at Betway

"FocusReactive helped us launch a high-performing website with 20% faster load times and 40% less manual work thanks to seamless integrations. DatoCMS also allowed our team to update content 50% faster, all delivered with clear communication and reliable project management."

Gal Lampel
Gal Lampel
Operations Manager, QuantHealth

Recent CMS projects

Traffic Guard

View Live
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Industry
Advertising Technology
Tech stack
Sanity
Next.JS
Vercel
Scope of Work
Website Migration
Maintenance

Arrive

View Live
Arrive logo overlaid on man talking on phone in a train
Industry
Mobility & Transportation
Technical Stack
Storyblok
NextJS
Tailwind
Vercel
Scope of Work
Design
Website Development

EasyPark

View Live
Laptop on pink surface showing a website with colorful hero section
Industry
Parking & Mobility
Technical Stack
Storyblok
Next.JS
Vercel
Scope of Work
Design
Website Development
Maintenance

Firsty

View Live
Laptop floating in clouds showing Firstly free mobile network website
Industry
Telecommunications
Technical stack
Storyblok
NextJS
Vercel
Scope of Work
Website Migration
Maintenance

Reverse Health

View Live
Laptop showing fitness and weight loss website for women over 40
Industry
Health & Wellness
Technical stack
Payload CMS
NextJS
PostgreSQL
Scope of Work
Website Development
Maintenance

Drupal to Contentful migration FAQs

Migration from Drupal to Headless CMS

A full end-to-end migration includes a content audit, architecture and schema redesign in Contentful, Next.js frontend development, data migration scripts, SEO preservation, and team training.

Most migrations take 6–9 weeks, depending on how many content types, custom Drupal modules, and pages you have.

We preserve SEO by mapping Drupal content to Contentful with a strictly defined field model, carrying over metadata, and building 301 redirects for every changed URL. Before cutover, we validate titles, descriptions, canonical tags, internal links, and structured data against the legacy site so search visibility stays perfectly intact.

We build custom migration scripts that extract your content from Drupal’s database, map it to the new structured fields, sanitize the data, and securely push it into Contentful via their Management API.

What we write about CMS migration and Contentful

Storyblok overview
Storyblok logo on blue gradient background

Storyblok overview

This article delves into the best use cases, major advantages, and the full spectrum of what Storyblok can offer to developers and content editors.
Storyblok vs. Sanity - A Comparison of Two Leading Headless CMS
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Storyblok vs. Sanity - A Comparison of Two Leading Headless CMS

We compare Storyblok and Sanity on ease of use, content modeling, integration, scalability, localization, developer support, security, documentation, and pricing.
Nextjs & Storyblok image optimization
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Nextjs & Storyblok image optimization

This article highlights how optimized images enhance user experience and improve SEO rankings by tackling challenges such as slow loading times, high bandwidth usage, and the significance of faster websites in search engine results.

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