Site migrations - piece of cake?

What is a site migration?

In the past 13 years, I was involved in a lot of enterprise-level website migrations. Of course, a website that has 10 pages, without complex content structures and filtering, without a lot of product data, without tagging, etc. is a different story, no real migration is needed in that case. I assume in this article that the target platform of website migration is a Drupal 8 CMS.

At more complex, bigger sites a website's content, functionalities, in some cases even the design had to move over to a new place, to a new platform, that provided in some way an improvement. Some motivating factors to migrate were:

• some functionalities were not available in the old system,
• previous platform/CMS was expensive (hard maintenance and/or expensive subscriptions were required)
• website design got outdated,
• content editing was too complex, 
• missing content moderation workflows,
• no multilingual capabilities in the old system,
• etc.

Scope of migration

• Website design/style
  • usually, the old design is not required to migrate over - as most of the cases a style of an older page is not good enough to cover expectations of visitors 
  •  only in rare cases, design/style migration is done and it can cause a lot of efforts to migrate over between different content management platforms
  • my suggestion is to create a new unique style or buy a ready to use a theme and customize it
     
• Functionalities
  • there were usually some custom functionalities that we had to migrate over
  • better to discuss the requirements and build something new that is "better" than the old functionality was, look around the web and check similar features and adapt, implement accordingly.
     
• Content
  • In most of the cases, we had to migrate the content,
  • best to provide a mechanism that can do content filtering and transformation, make it easy to clean the content,
  • never migrate over the content as is! take it apart, analyze and rebuild,
  • it can take a lot of efforts to do manually, 
  • best to create custom rules, content transformation, and extraction processes to minimize time and effort.

Cost of migration - Drupal 8

When referring to the cost of migration I assume that the target platform/CMS is Drupal 8 and the source site is an enterprise-level website. When I estimate costs, I'm referring to my experiences, doing my best to calculate engineering skills required and time needed, these are rough estimates.

• Website design/style  options
  • reusing old website design/style
    • development cost: 5000 USD - 10 000 USD 
       
  • new design/style
    • cost: 50 -  100 000 (or more) USD - you can buy a budget theme and proceed or create a fancy new and unique design/style that rocks, it's up to you and your needs and goals
    • budget theme: 50-100 USD - you will need a developer to customize it to your needs for sure. I had a chance to look into some commercial themes and honestly to make them ready, could take weeks of additional work and effort - these themes are not correctly dissected and not completely themed, you will always want to place some block to some other position, to make them reused and to reference some content structure that isn't there initially
      • additional development cost: 1000 USD - 10 000 USD
      • pros: there are really good themes that have also some structures, functionalities bundled, including ecommerce functionalities, ready to use some contributed modules to store and maintaining product data related structures, facets, views, etc. 
      • cons: some elements of the site may not look as you would expect and additional effort will be needed for sure
    • unique design/style: 2000 - 100 000(or more) USD for design and:
      • additional development cost: 5000 - 50 000 USD
      • pros: you can get the look and feel that you imagine and a professional design/team is there to support you in that, will get a unique design that no one else has
      • cons: it can cost a lot and also development work is more there, as usually, these designs are more fancy, more dynamic, more interactivity needed, which means harder to dissect and theme.  
         
• Functionalities - rebuilding or finding an alternative solution 
  • rebuilding - programming the same behavior in the new platform 
    • cost: 5000 - 50 000 USD - you may need only a tagging based filtering on some content, or you may need complex faceted navigation using a hierarchical, multilevel facet, with 50 or more various product attributes
    • pros: will get functionalities that worked before, your visitors were probably happy about them as you wish to rebuild, right? Ask and analyze visitors to decide...
  • alternative solution - by reusing some contributed modules, customizing them as required
    • cost: 1000 - 20 000 USD - you may need only a tagging based filtering on some content, or you may need complex faceted navigation using a hierarchical, multilevel facet, with 50 or more various product attributes
    • pros: will get some new functionalities that may be better than the ones you had, also it may be cheaper to implement, need to analyze for sure to pick the right approach
• Content
  • ​​​​​​​manual content migration
    • ​​​​​​​executed by you -  you manually download all the required files and images, resources you need, you adjust them and format them as required and you manually upload and create the same in the new platform. Also, you create required references accordingly, like internal links, referring images, files on pages.
      • cost: time and effort required from you and your team - time to execute: 1 - 5 months
      • pros: you may be able to clean the content before uploading in the new platform
  • automatic content migration -
    • executed by us (developers) - you define rules, what to extract from the existing website, you define destination structures where to place them, how to refer images, to download certain images and files and attach to pages automatically on the fly when we execute
      • we execute by using some software tools and custom processes 
      • cost: 3000 - 10 000 USD