Drupal to Sanity Migration Services

Drupal served the web well for two decades. It pioneered structured content, custom content types, and a solid permissions system. But the architecture that made Drupal powerful in 2010 is what makes it painful in 2026.

Every Drupal upgrade is a project in itself. The jump from Drupal 7 to 9 or 10 isn't an upgrade — it's a rebuild. Module compatibility breaks, custom themes need rewriting, and the PHP rendering layer adds server overhead that tanks your Core Web Vitals. Meanwhile, your editorial team is stuck fighting a content editing experience that feels like it was designed for database administrators, not writers.

Sanity changes the equation entirely. It's a structured content platform built for the modern web — real-time collaborative editing, a fully customizable authoring environment called Sanity Studio, and a content lake that serves your data via API to any frontend, anywhere.

Why Teams Are Leaving Drupal for Sanity

The Real Problems with Drupal

Upgrade Hell

Drupal's major version upgrades are notorious. Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 requires a full migration, not an update. Contributed modules you depend on may not have Drupal 10 versions. Custom modules need rewriting. With Drupal 7's end-of-life already extended multiple times, teams are essentially running on borrowed time.

Performance Bottlenecks

Drupal renders pages server-side through PHP. Even with aggressive caching via Varnish or Redis, your TTFB suffers under load. Authenticated user experiences bypass most caching layers entirely. The monolithic architecture couples your CMS, rendering engine, and API layer together — scaling one means scaling all of them.

Editorial Experience

Drupal's admin interface is functional but dated. Paragraph-based page building feels clunky next to modern structured content editors. Content preview requires custom configuration. Real-time collaboration doesn't exist natively. Your content team ends up spending more time fighting the tool than actually writing.

Hosting and Maintenance Costs

Drupal requires PHP hosting, a database server, caching layers, and regular security patching. Hosting on Pantheon or Acquia runs $200-500+/month for production-grade infrastructure. Security updates drop regularly and need immediate attention — Drupal's SA-CORE advisories are frequent and often critical.

What Sanity Brings to the Table

Real-Time Collaborative Editing

Sanity Studio supports real-time collaboration out of the box. Multiple editors can work on the same document simultaneously — no locking, no conflicts. Think Google Docs, but for your CMS.

Fully Customizable Studio

Sanity Studio is built with React. Every aspect of the editing interface is customizable — custom input components, conditional fields, computed values, workflow states. You build the exact authoring experience your team needs, not whatever a contributed module sort-of approximates.

Content Lake and GROQ

Sanity's content lake stores your content as structured data accessible via GROQ (Graph-Relational Object Queries) or GraphQL. GROQ is purpose-built for content queries and remarkably expressive. Your content becomes a true API-first data source that can power websites, apps, digital signage, or whatever else you throw at it.

Portable Text

Sanity's rich text format, Portable Text, stores content as structured data rather than HTML blobs. Your rich text renders correctly on any platform — web, native apps, email — without HTML parsing hacks.

Our Drupal to Sanity Migration Process

Phase 1: Content Architecture Audit (Week 1)

We map every Drupal content type, field, taxonomy vocabulary, paragraph type, and entity reference in your existing system. We identify content relationships, media assets, and URL structures. We document your current Drupal modules and assess which functionality needs replication in Sanity Studio versus the frontend.

Phase 2: Sanity Schema Design (Week 2)

We design your Sanity schemas to match and improve upon your Drupal content architecture. This isn't a 1:1 copy — it's a chance to clean up years of content type sprawl. We consolidate redundant types, flatten unnecessary entity reference chains, and design schemas that make editorial work intuitive. Where your team needs them, we build custom Studio components.

Phase 3: Content Migration (Weeks 3-4)

We build automated migration scripts that extract content from Drupal's database (or JSON:API / REST export), transform it to match your new Sanity schemas, and import it via Sanity's mutation API. This handles:

• All content types and their field data
• Taxonomy terms mapped to Sanity references or tags
• Media assets migrated to Sanity's asset pipeline with metadata preserved
• Paragraph/block content converted to Portable Text
• Internal links remapped to Sanity document references
• Multilingual content (i18n) properly structured

We run the migration iteratively — test imports, validation, correction, re-import — until every piece of content is verified.

Phase 4: Frontend Build (Weeks 3-6, parallel)

While content migration runs, we build your new frontend in Next.js or Astro. This is where the performance gains actually show up. Static generation with ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) or on-demand revalidation means your pages load in milliseconds. We implement visual editing with Sanity's Presentation tool so editors see live previews as they type.

Phase 5: SEO Preservation and Launch (Week 6-7)

SEO preservation is non-negotiable. We implement:

• Full 301 redirect mapping from every Drupal URL (including /node/XXX paths) to new clean URLs
• XML sitemap generation with proper lastmod dates
• Structured data (JSON-LD) for all content types
• Meta tag migration — titles, descriptions, Open Graph, canonical URLs
• Internal link rewriting throughout all migrated content
• Google Search Console monitoring post-launch to catch any indexing issues within 48 hours

We keep your old Drupal instance running in read-only mode for 30 days post-launch as a safety net.

SEO Preservation Strategy

Drupal sites accumulate real search equity over years. Our migration preserves every bit of it. We crawl your existing site with Screaming Frog to capture every indexed URL, then build a redirect map that accounts for Drupal's pathauto patterns, taxonomy term pages, views-generated listing pages, and any custom URL aliases.

Post-launch, we monitor Google Search Console daily for the first two weeks. We track indexed page counts, crawl errors, and ranking positions for your top keywords. Any issues get addressed same-day.

Timeline and Pricing

A typical Drupal to Sanity migration runs 6-8 weeks depending on content volume and frontend complexity.

• Small sites (under 500 content items, 5-10 content types): Starting at $15,000
• Medium sites (500-5,000 content items, custom workflows): Starting at $30,000
• Enterprise sites (5,000+ items, multilingual, complex integrations): Starting at $60,000

Every migration includes a free initial audit where we assess your Drupal instance and provide a detailed scope, timeline, and fixed-price quote.