Migrating to Craft CMS: What to Expect

Migrating to a new CMS is a big decision, and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But sometimes it’s unavoidable, as your existing platform has become more of a hindrance than a help.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably already battling against yours. You may even have decided that Craft CMS is where you want to end up (we love it BTW). What you probably don't have yet is a clear picture of what the move involves: how long it takes, how much of your team's time it needs, and what things look like once you’ve migrated.

In this guide, we'll take you through all of that — where you might be migrating from, the Craft CMS migration process step by step, realistic timelines and costs, and what is likely to change. And if you're still weighing up whether Craft is right for you, you might want to roll back a step and read our comparisons of Craft CMS vs WordPress and Craft CMS vs Drupal, or look through our Craft CMS FAQs.

For what it's worth, a migration is one of the best opportunities you'll get to fix the way your website works. It needs to be done properly, but if it is, you’ll come out with cleaner content, a CMS your team actually wants to use, and a platform to support business growth.

Why Do Businesses Migrate to Craft CMS?

Everyone has their reasons, and they vary from project to project. However, they tend to fall into a few familiar camps…

Your platform is reaching end of life. When security support ends, the clock starts ticking. Drupal 7, for example, stopped receiving security updates on 5 January 2025, fourteen years after its release. Getting from Drupal 7 to a modern version is more or less a rebuild anyway.

Plugin sprawl has become a liability. WordPress at its core is pretty secure. The problem is everything that gets bolted onto it. 

Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2026 report recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025 — a 42 per cent increase on the year before — with 91 per cent of them found in plugins. Worse, 46 per cent weren't patched by the time they were made public.

Your website can't keep up with your brand. Themes and page builders mean designing around the platform's limitations. Craft doesn’t have themes, so every project is bespoke, and the content model is shaped around your design. Your website looks and works exactly the way your brand needs it to, now and as it evolves.

Where Are You Migrating to Craft CMS From?

The platform you're leaving shapes your migration more than almost anything else. Some make it easy to do; others make it very difficult indeed. Start here.

WordPress. This is by far the most common route to Craft, and Pixel & Tonic's wp-import tool, released alongside Craft 5.5, has made it a lot more straightforward. It imports posts, pages, media, users, and taxonomies in one go, although it recreates your existing structure, which isn't always what you want (more on that below).

💡 Further reading: Migrating from WordPress to Craft CMS: A Complete Guide

Drupal. Drupal content is already structured into content types, fields and taxonomies, which map reasonably well onto Craft's sections and fields. The complexity tends to sit in custom modules and bespoke functionality, and Drupal sites are often large, so there's more of everything to move.

There's no one-command importer for Drupal. Modern Drupal sites can usually expose their content through the core JSON: API module, while older Drupal 7 sites generally mean going straight to the database.

Hosted site builders. Squarespace, Wix, and Webflow are easy to get started with, but harder to leave. Squarespace exports your site in a WordPress-format file, but leaves plenty behind. Wix is stricter still; its own support documentation explains that your site must be hosted and operated on Wix's servers. In practice, migrating from a site builder often means copying content across by hand, so budget for it.

Legacy and bespoke systems. ExpressionEngine, an in-house CMS built in 2009, a folder of static HTML files… we've seen most things. These migrations usually involve pulling content straight from the database (or scraping it from the live site) into a format Craft can import. They're very doable; they just need more investigation up front.

Older versions of Craft. If you're already on Craft 3 or Craft 4, you're looking at an upgrade rather than a migration, which is a different (and usually much less disruptive) job. It is an urgent one, though. According to Craft's supported versions policy, Craft 4 stopped receiving security fixes on 30 April 2026, while Craft 5 will be supported with security updates until the end of 2031.

How Long Does a Craft CMS Migration Take?

You guessed it… It depends.

That said, it depends on a relatively predictable set of factors: how much content you have, how well it’s organised already, the number of integrations you have, whether you need multi-site or multilingual, and whether you’re redesigning at the same time.

The Craft CMS Migration Process, Step by Step

Every agency will have its own take on the migration process, but the fundamentals don't change much.

1. Discovery and content audit

You need to know exactly what you've got. That means crawling your existing site — Screaming Frog is our tool of choice — and building an inventory of every page, content type, form, and file. That includes your integrations, as they’ll need rebuilding.

But you shouldn’t assume you’ll bring everything with you. Most websites carry a lot of dead weight. An Ahrefs study of over a billion pages found that 96.55 per cent get no organic traffic from Google. Some of your content will be earning its keep, some can be merged into something better, and some can simply be left behind (with a redirect, naturally).

2. Content modelling

Craft doesn't have a one-size-fits-all "page". Instead, your developers define sections — singles for one-off pages like your homepage, channels for things like news and case studies, and structures for hierarchical content — along with the entry types and fields each one needs.

Flexible layouts come from Matrix fields, which give editors a set of building blocks (a text block, an image gallery, a quote, a call to action) to arrange as they need. It's a much tidier approach than a free-for-all page builder, and it means your content is stored as structured, reusable data.

The temptation is to recreate your old site's structure exactly, and tools like wp-import make that very easy. Resist it where you can. If your current CMS forced you into awkward workarounds, this is your chance to get rid of them.

3. Design and front-end build

Craft doesn't come with themes. Every front end is built bespoke, using Craft's Twig templating language, which is why Craft sites tend to be fast, lean, and on-brand. It also means you'll need to decide early whether this is a like-for-like rebuild or a redesign.

Both are fine; it just depends on what’s right for you. A like-for-like rebuild is quicker and lower risk, especially for SEO. A redesign makes the most of the investment, but every new feature and extra round of feedback pushes launch back. Agree on the scope early.

💡 Further reading: Website Redesign: 10 Signs it's Time (And How to Get it Right)

4. Content migration

This is usually the heavy lift. WordPress sites can use wp-import. Most other migrations use Feed Me, Craft's first-party import plugin, which takes content from XML, CSV, or JSON files and maps it to your new fields. If there’s something awkward, we can manage it with a custom script.

Content migration is rarely completely simple. And there’s usually cleanup to do along the way. So, budget time for it. And some content is better re-entered by hand; your most important landing pages will probably benefit from a rewrite to suit the new layouts anyway.

5. Protecting your SEO

There’s a good chance your URLs will change, which means there’s an SEO risk. Every old URL needs mapping to its new home with a 301 redirect, and every page's metadata needs to come across. In Craft, plugins like SEOmatic and Retour handle this. Start the redirect map at the beginning of the project, not in launch week, and keep those redirects in place for at least a year, as Google recommends.

💡 Further reading: Website Migration SEO: How to Protect Your Rankings

6. Testing, training and the content freeze

In the final weeks before launch, everything gets tested: content accuracy, forms, integrations, page speed, accessibility and redirects. Your editors should be trained on the new CMS before launch day.

This is also when the content freeze kicks in. For a short period before launch, content on your old site shouldn't change (or, if it must, changes get logged and replicated on the new site). Otherwise, that urgent news story published on the old site the week before launch will vanish.

7. Launch and aftercare

Launch early in the week and away from your busiest trading period, then crawl the new site, check your redirects and keep a close eye on Google Search Console for the first few weeks (actually, do this regularly anyway). After that, Craft needs looking after like any other platform, with regular updates, security patches and ongoing improvements — ideally as part of an ongoing support and optimisation plan.

What Will Your Team Need to Do?

Even with an experienced agency (hello) holding your hand, a migration to Craft CMS asks a fair bit of your team. Make sure you have adequate internal availability.

Make decisions, and make them quickly. Content audits, content models, designs, and redirect maps all need sign-off. Nominate one person with the authority to make the call.

Review your migrated content. Your agency can check that content has imported correctly. Only your team can check that it's right. Check that nothing has slipped through the cracks.

Hand over the keys. Logins for your current CMS, hosting, domain and DNS, Google Analytics, Search Console, and any third-party tools you're integrating with. Get these together early.

Stick to the content freeze. It's only for a short period, but it matters. Make sure everyone knows.

Show up to training. Craft is intuitive, but every build is different. An hour or two with your agency before launch saves a lot of time later.

How Much Does It Cost to Migrate to Craft CMS?

As with any website project, cost depends on scope. But a Craft migration is made up of the same few components every time, and it helps to know what they are before the quotes start landing.

💡 Further reading: How Much Does a Website Cost?

The Craft licence. Craft's pricing is refreshingly straightforward. The Solo edition is free, but it's limited to a single user. Team costs $279, and Pro costs $399, each adding more users and permissions as you go up, while Enterprise is priced on request. Every paid licence includes a year of updates, then $99 a year after that.

Plugins. Craft needs far fewer plugins than WordPress, but most builds use a handful for things like SEO, forms, and navigation — here are the ones we recommend. Commercial plugins typically charge a one-off fee with an optional annual renewal for updates.

Hosting. You can host Craft on any decent PHP hosting, or use Craft Cloud, Pixel & Tonic's own platform. Craft Cloud costs around $130 a month on the Team plan and around $260 a month on Pro, which includes your Craft Pro licence.

The build and migration. This is the big one. Unfortunately, migrations can vary so much there’s little point in quoting a cost here. The best thing to do is to get in touch, and we can help you from there.

Ongoing support. Budget for updates, security patches, hosting management, and continuous improvement after launch. It's easy to overlook, but it's absolutely essential and will pay for itself many times over.

Be cautious of any quote that looks suspiciously cheap. Migrations get underquoted when content clean-up, redirects, and testing are left out of scope, and those costs have a habit of causing problems down the road.

What Changes for Your Editors After Moving to Craft CMS?

For most teams, this is where the move to Craft can pay dividends. The editing experience is usually the biggest day-to-day change.

Structured fields replace free-form pages. In Craft, a case study has its own fields — a title, a client name, a summary, a hero image, a body. Editors fill them in, and the templates take care of how it all looks. The result is consistency across the site.

Building blocks replace the page builder. There's no drag-and-drop page builder in Craft. It’s a deliberate choice. Matrix fields give editors a set of on-brand components to arrange as they need, so new pages can be built quickly without the design unravelling over time.

You see it before you publish it. Live Preview shows your changes side by side with the editing screen, and drafts and revisions mean you can work on a page without touching the live version (and roll back if something goes wrong).

Permissions fit how your team works. Craft's user groups and permissions let you decide who can edit, who can publish, and which sections each person can touch. For multi-site setups, editors can manage every site from one control panel. And Craft 5 adds two-factor authentication and passkeys as standard.

Migrating to Craft CMS Is Worth Doing Properly

A Craft CMS migration is a serious undertaking. It takes time, money, and a fair bit of commitment from your team. There's no getting away from that. But very few projects give you the chance to rethink how your content is structured, how your team works, and how your website supports the business, all at once.

Migrations reward experience, and Craft is a specialist platform, so choose a partner who has done this many times before — ideally a verified Craft CMS partner (we are one, you guessed it!). Our guide to choosing the right web design agency covers the questions worth asking a prospective agency.

The businesses that get the most out of Craft are the ones that treat migration as an opportunity. Copying your old problems onto a new platform is a waste of a good CMS (and your time!). Done properly, you shouldn't need to do this again for a very long time.