"Should we move off Drupal?" comes up constantly with clients who inherited a Drupal 7 or Drupal 9 site from a previous agency and are now paying enterprise-level maintenance for a site that functions like a brochure. Before anyone touches a migration plan, the decision itself deserves real scrutiny — because migrating is expensive and not always the right call.
The case for staying on Drupal
If any of these are true, moving to WordPress will likely cost you capability you'll miss:
- You have more than five distinct content types with complex entity relationships (a university course catalogue referencing departments, instructors, and terms)
- You need granular, role-based editorial workflows across dozens of editors
- You're running true multilingual content with translated taxonomies, not just a translated homepage
- You have custom integrations with government or enterprise systems built on Drupal's API layer
WordPress can approximate most of this with Advanced Custom Fields, WPML, and custom post types, but you're rebuilding, in plugins, functionality Drupal gives you natively — and plugin-stacked WordPress sites carry their own long-term fragility.
The case for moving to WordPress
Moving makes sense when the Drupal install is over-provisioned for what the site does: a marketing site with a blog, a handful of landing pages, and a contact form, running on Drupal because a past IT department mandated it. In that case you're paying for:
- More expensive developer hours (Drupal specialists bill $130–$200 CAD/hour vs. $90–$150 CAD/hour for WordPress in most Canadian markets)
- A steeper learning curve for in-house marketing staff who need to make small edits
- Major version upgrade cycles (Drupal 7 to 9/10 was effectively a full rebuild for most sites) that WordPress's continuous-update model avoids
What you lose in the move
Be honest with stakeholders about the trade-offs before committing:
- Editorial granularity. Drupal's Content Moderation and permission system is more sophisticated out of the box than anything WordPress ships with; you'll likely need PublishPress or a custom role setup to approximate it.
- Structured content modelling. Drupal's entity reference fields make relational content natural. WordPress's Advanced Custom Fields gets you most of the way there but requires more manual configuration and discipline to keep consistent.
- Multilingual maturity. Drupal's multilingual system is more mature than WPML or Polylang for complex cases (translated taxonomy terms, per-language URL structures, translated custom fields).
- Some integrations may need rebuilding from scratch rather than a straightforward field mapping, particularly anything built against Drupal's JSON:API.
Mapping your content model before you commit
Before pricing a migration, map every Drupal content type and its fields against a WordPress equivalent:
| Drupal concept | WordPress equivalent | Migration complexity |
|---|---|---|
| Content type | Custom post type | Low |
| Field (text, entity reference) | ACF field | Low-medium |
| Taxonomy term reference | WordPress taxonomy | Low |
| Paragraphs (component-based body) | ACF Flexible Content / block patterns | Medium-high |
| Views (custom queries/listings) | WP_Query + custom templates or a plugin | Medium |
| Content Moderation workflow | PublishPress or custom roles | Medium |
| Multilingual (Content Translation) | WPML or Polylang | Medium-high |
The fields that map one-to-one migrate cheaply. Paragraphs-based component content and Views-driven listing pages are where migration cost balloons, because there's no automated equivalent — someone has to rebuild the component library and the query logic by hand.
Cost and risk, realistically
A straightforward content-type-only migration (no complex Paragraphs, no multilingual, under 200 pages) runs $8,000–$18,000 CAD. A migration involving component-based content, multilingual, and custom integrations typically runs $25,000–$60,000 CAD, and carries real project risk: content loss during transfer, broken URL structures hurting SEO rankings if redirects aren't mapped meticulously, and a multi-week period where both systems need to stay in sync.
If you're weighing Drupal against WordPress for your specific site, send us your content model and current pain points and we'll give you an honest recommendation — including telling you to stay put if that's the right call.
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Surrey, BC
A full-service digital agency working in WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, Webflow, React, and React Native. We partner with universities, governments, and growing brands to ship sites and products that hold up after launch.
