Migrating to WordPress: what you gain, and what you have to set up

WordPress scored 75.4 on overall migration readiness across our sample. Drupal scored 76.2. If you are hoping the data will hand you a winner, it will not, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What genuinely differs is which half each platform is bad at, and that is the useful thing to know before you sign anything. You are not picking a quality level. You are picking which blind spot you inherit.

The usual diagram for this is seven equal circles round a logo, with redirects given precisely the same visual weight as the SSL certificate. That is a picture of a checklist, not of a risk. Weighted by what actually goes wrong, it looks more like this:

The two in red are both decided by the templates, on the day you cut over, and neither of them looks broken afterwards. That is the whole problem. A site with no redirects and no structured data renders beautifully.

83.9% of WordPress sites publish structured data, against 32.2% of Drupal sites. That is a 2.6× difference, and it happens for the least glamorous reason imaginable: the plugins most people already run emit it whether anybody asked them to or not. Open Graph tells the same story, 90.8% against 66.6%.

This matters more than it did five years ago. Structured data is how search engines and the answer machines work out what a page actually is. Coming from Drupal, this is the genuine upgrade, and you get it by turning up.

40.1% of WordPress sites send X-Content-Type-Options. 49.5% send HSTS. On Drupal those are 97.6% and 72.7%, a 2.4× gap. Nothing about WordPress prevents any of it. They are simply off by default, so a migration that does not explicitly switch them on delivers you to a house with worse locks than the one you left.

It is an afternoon of work, set once at the server or the edge, applying to every page you will ever publish. Which makes it the cheapest thing on this page and, reliably, the thing nobody puts on the plan.

Everything here comes from each provider’s own published terms, checked on 5 August 2026. Nobody has paid us, and we have not audited anyone’s work.

The free host migration, which probably does not apply to you

Managed hosts advertise free migrations and they mean it. Kinsta does unlimited migrations on every plan, usually inside two business days, and will remove malware it finds along the way at no charge. WP Engine runs something similar.

Read the small print though. Kinsta’s terms want “a WordPress host or a standard WordPress installation”, which is WordPress moving to WordPress. It will not turn a Drupal node into a WordPress post. If you are coming from another CMS, this offer is not for you, however cheerfully it ranks for the question you just asked.

The plugin route, if the content is well behaved

Coming off Drupal, the tool everyone reaches for is FG Drupal to WordPress, which talks to the Drupal database directly. Its listing shows 700+ active installations and 4.6 stars from 111 reviews. Free gets you articles, pages, categories, tags and images. Premium adds users, custom fields, menus, and the URL redirects.

Sit with that last one. Every measurement we publish says the redirects are what lose the traffic, and on the free tier the redirects are exactly what is left to you. It is the one line item genuinely worth paying for, and it is behind the upgrade.

The agency route, when the site does more than publish pages

Views, custom modules and theme logic do not migrate with any tool, so a site that does real work needs people. Published ranges start around $22,000 for something under 200 pages and run well into six figures for government and university estates. Treat those as weather, not a forecast; scope moves them far more than page count does.

The best value is not the lowest bid. It is the proposal that already contains a URL inventory built from server logs rather than a CMS export, a redirect map you can run rather than read, and a straight answer about what the new theme will emit. A proposal missing those is not cheaper. It has just moved the invoice to the month after launch.

If you are on Drupal, the Drupal guide is the one you want, and the security-header trade above is the part to read twice. Leaving a DXP, Sitecore to WordPress covers what has to be replaced rather than ported, because personalisation and workflow do not come with you. Coming back from headless, Contentful to WordPress deals with what changes when the front end stops being yours to build.

Somewhere else entirely? The full index has the other pairs, and the migration plan is the same whatever you are leaving.

If I had one afternoon and had to spend it where it did the most good, I would not spend it reading platform comparisons, including this one. I would spend it building the complete list of every URL I own, because every decision after that gets better once the list exists and worse while it does not.

Then I would check what my site actually emits today, rather than what I assume it emits, so I know what I am about to lose rather than finding out in November. A free scan grades your site on the same signals measured above and flags what will not survive the move.

The furniture will be fine. It is always fine. Set up the post redirection.