How To Migrate Your Website from Drupal to WordPress

migrate drupal to wordpress

When I started blogging about 3 years ago I tested out Blogger, WordPress and Drupal. I didn’t like the fact that Blogger is hosted by Google and you’ll always have that annoying top bar on a page so ruled that out quickly. WordPress seemed a whole lot better and so did Drupal. In the end I opted for Drupal, mainly because I have a friend who is a Drupal developer.

My Drupal experience

It took me a while to set up my first blog (The Undercover Recruiter) as I insisted on not spending a penny on getting any help. This is the best way to learn I suppose and within a few weeks I had a good understanding of how Drupal works, what it can and can’t do and what plugins (modules) I should be using. I then set up 2 other blogs (you’re reading this on one) with Drupal; once you know to set a blog up it’s easy to replicate the process. The question here is how much time I dedicated to learning Drupal – probably too much.

If only I had started with WordPress

Fast forward about a year and a half and we decided to set up a new company page on WordPress, as very few people are familiar with Drupal I thought it better to go WordPress. That’s when I realised that blogging is actually really simple when you have the right tools, WordPress happens to be intended for blogging so makes perfect sense.

Why should you drop Drupal?

I started thinking about my other 3 blogs and how I’m stuck with Drupal for those. Then one day I had a flash of inspiration and thought about migrating from Drupal to WordPress. Reasons I had to move away from Drupal:

  • Drupal is very clunky for blogging, it might be a powerful content management system (CMS) for big sites but unnecessarily so for your average blogger.
  • There are much fewer themes available for Drupal than WordPress, if you want a decent looking site you might have to get it done by a designer and web developer – if you have a big budget of course.
  • You don’t get the cool WordPress plugins on Drupal, you’re lucky if they ‘convert’ some of them over to Drupal after a few month’s wait. An example of this would be the Google Plus buttons which took ages to find their way to Drupal.
  • As Drupal is more niche, you’ll find fewer peers out there that can help you with problems. Whenever I would google an issue, most solutions would be for WordPress.
  • WordPress is intuitive (well as intuitive as a CMS can get), whereas Drupal almost requires you to be a developer to work it properly.

How to do the migration

So I did a quick google search and found a company that specialises in Drupal to WordPress migrations. As I have 3 sites, I started with the smallest one to see how it would work out. The process is to first back up everything on Drupal, then everything gets somehow turned into WordPress content and the URLs get redirection routes. You shut down the Drupal site; the best way I found was to do a new WordPress install on the same location to wipe Drupal – this may not be the safest way though. Then you import the content into the new site and the pages and structure will appear.

A few hiccups along the way

It won’t always be perfect, for instance all my images that used to be centered were now left aligned. Some code vanished on blog posts and some text got very muddled – I believe this was an issue with unclean HTML on Drupal though. And I for one don’t like taking sites down and re-installing, there were a few times when I thought everything had completely crashed beyond the point of recovery. But fear not, this blog and the other 2 are working fine today. In fact, they are working much better than when they were running on Drupal.

Where do you go from here?

If you’re stuck with Drupal and need a safe passage to WordPress, I would suggest you get in touch with the migration master Jordi Cabot, his company WPMigrations have migrated over 500,000 post already at a reasonable cost. This is not an affiliate link or anything by the way, I am very happy to recommend these guys. Good luck to you and see you on the WordPress side!

Related: What’s Better for My Blog’s Top Level Domain Suffix: .com or .net?

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , ,

Why are there No Famous British Bloggers?

uk bloggers where are you

I have sometimes asked myself why there is one country in the English-speaking world that doesn’t have that many prominent bloggers (and blogs). This country is of course Great Britain. When I started out blogging I read lots of blogs written by Americans and Australians, with the odd Canadian ones thrown into the mix. Never ever did I read any UK blogs until I proactively sought out a blogging meetup in London. The two prominent bloggers I got to know there were based in England but one is actually from Denmark and the other one has now moved to California. Based on their international orientation I don’t think they are very representative of the British blogging legion (if indeed there is one).

What type of blogs are we talking here?

In the industry I operate (recruitment and HR) there are a few really good UK bloggers. I assume that’s the case for most industries, there will be subject matter experts writing blogs but these will be aimed at a narrow target audience. What I am after are blogs that are more general and write about universal themes, such as marketing, business and even social media. A few examples would be the blogs of Chris Brogan, Leo Babauta, Penelope Trunk to name but a few. I have yet to find a blog of that calibre in this country.

So what’s stopping Brits from blogging more?

I think there a couple of reasons the British don’t blog as muh as say the Americans. In fact, if you look at how Americans consume news, it’s by reading local newspapers and watching local news (all the television networks do localised news). This of course makes blogs the ideal place to have a location-independent conversation. Some of the best writers in the US have either started as bloggers or are active bloggers alongside their published work.

Newspapers still get more readers online

In the UK we have a different media scenario. There is a very active discourse happening on a national level, thanks to hugely influential newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph. On top of that we have the BBC which is the number one news and information source for most Brits on the radio, on television and online (that’s their tagline in fact). The best thinkers in the country don’t blog, they have columns in newspapers or they have a radio show.

A different media landscape can to some degree explain the lack of prominent blogs and blogger in this country. The reason I say some degree is that France, a country with a similar media setup to the UK, actually have a very active blogosphere. Across the channel I have been told blogging is popular due to the French love of the written word – everyone wants to be a writer and blogging is the natural place to start.

Please let me know what you reckon

I would really like someone to tell me what they think of the state of UK blogs, this post is written purely based on my perception so if you have another view please share it!

Filed Under: Blogging, Events, UK Tagged With: , ,

10 Blogging Lessons I’ve Learned the Hard Way [Video]

social media poland blogging ways to succeed

My buddy Krystian Dryniak runs a monthly meetup in Krakow, Poland aptly called Social Media Poland and he asked me to be his special virtual guest for his May meetup (I’m probably more virtual than special).  I was asked to record 10-15 minutes about myself, my thoughts on social media and blogging in particular (which I have learned the hard way, by trial and error).

Here’s the video they showed on the evening, I had some good feedback from their attendees and hope to see some of them coming to my own meetup Social Media LONDON one day.

This is roughly what I say in the video:

Welcome everyone to Social Media Poland, in Krakow my favourite Polish city!!

I was asked by your host Krystian to say hello as I run a community called Social Media London – which is where I met Krystian about a year ago now.

So briefly about me, my name is Jorgen Sundberg and I am originally from Sweden and have lived in London for 9 years now. I’m a very active social media user, you’ll find me on Twitter and all other places.

My background is that I used to work for an IT recruitment agency, where I recruited top IT talent for large companies across Europe.

I was always an early adopter of technology and started using social media tools very early on, back in those days we used tools like OpenBC, Viadeo, Plaxo and a little site called LinkedIn. Because I learnt to maximise these tools I was able to reach the best candidates in the market quicker than my competitors and it made me a successful recruiter.

About 2 years ago I set up a company called Link Humans, where we train and consult both recruitment agencies and large employers on how to use LinkedIn and other social media tools to recruit quicker, better and cheaper.

Alongside this we started a community called Social media London, to gain more exposure in the social media world and it has worked very well.

My blogging experience

Krystian asked me to also talk about my experience of blogging and how it helps your personal brand. For me it’s absolutely vital to have a publishing platform of some kind where you can create content. A blog is great place to start, it’s free, simple but it does require your commitment if you want to make it into a good blog.

I started blogging back when I was a recruiter and that blog is still going, in fact it’s the no.1 recruitment blog in the UK now. Then we have a blog for Link Humans where we write for our target clients, we produce case studies and practical social media tips for manager types. Then I also have a personal blog where I can put anything that doesn’t really fit into the other two, such as writing about a holiday to Italy.

My 10 top tips for bloggers would be:

1. Realise that blogging is a commitment, you should be posting at least once per week and ideally 2-3 times per week. A post doesn’t have to be War & Peace, about 400 words will do – think quality over quantity.

2. Write stuff that helps others, make your posts valuable to the reader. If they find value in it, they are likely to tell others about you and your blog. Do some research, what are other bloggers writing about – maybe you can get inspiration from them?

3. Mix up your content – five years ago everyone was just writing posts. Nowadays you can create a SlideShare presentation, a YouTube clip like this, a podcast and embed on your blog. Try to alternate a bit and see what works for your audience.

4. Don’t worry about SEO, when you are a blogger is all down to your content. Google loves fresh and original content and they will promote you in their results when you deliver this. Big companies can worry about SEO because they have short term campaigns running all the time – your blog is a long-term project and there is no end date.

5. Make your site look nice and clean – there’s nothing more annoying than a personal blog with too many menus, advertising and widgets all over the place. Keep it simple and let the content speak for itself.

6. Stimulate conversation, sometimes the best content you can write is very short and a bit controversial. People love an opinion and they tend to want to react. Encourage comments and make sure you’re there to respond.

7. Connect with other bloggers and social media types. Going to meet ups is a great way of connecting, you can also check out relevant hashtags, Twitter chats and LinkedIn groups to find more like-minded people. When you get to know people, they will start reading and hopefully sharing your content.

8. This should be easy for you at the social media meetup…. Use Social media to drive traffic to your posts. Don’t overshare but be sure to share at least once on the main platforms, you never know who is looking. For a personal blog I find that Facebook works really well, for my recruitment blog it’s a toss-up between Twitter and LinkedIn. For our company blog, LinkedIn is the best channel – this is where you find business people hanging out.

9. Check your stats to see what type of content people actually search for (Google Analytics) and where people are sharing. These are the type of articles that you should be focusing on.

10. Enjoy blogging! Create a routine where you set aside maybe 30 minutes every day for creating content of some sort. You’ll find that not only are you teaching others about a topic, you’ll also learn lots yourself.

That’s it for me I think. If you’re coming over to London anytime soon or have friends here (which I am sure you do), check out Social Media London or come to a workshop sometime. Have a great evening and thank you Krystian for having me there virtually. Bye now!

Related: LinkedIn and Personal Branding Presentation at the Nordic Career Forum [Slides].

Filed Under: Blogging, Video Tagged With: ,

28 Smart Blogging Tips by Marko Saric at Social Media London

marko saric blogging tips social media london

The most recent Social Media London meetup was entitled “The keys to successful blogging” and I had to pleasure of introducing my pal Marko Saric, a London-based blogger who runs one of the world’s top 50 blogs – HowToMakeMyBlog.com, as the speaker of the evening.

I’ve personally learned a lot about blogging from Marko over the last 2/3 years. We actually met at a blogging meetup here in London and have kept in touch ever since. What I like about Marko’s approach to blogging is that he’s not fussed about SEO for instance, for him it’s all about producing quality content. And whilst he knows how to use social media, he’s not a heavy user of it himself. Instead of spending hours and hours on promoting his blog, he lets the content speak for itself.

The truth about blogging in my humble opinion is that promoting content (whether it’s via SEO or social media) is easy, creating quality content is hard. In the long run it’s the quality content that wins and I think most bloggers know this by know. Successful blogging is about making choices, about focusing your time and effort on what is really going to push the blog forward.

Let’s see what Marko had to say on the evening:

And here are the other posts about the meetup:

And here’s a post about Marko’s talk at the meetup last year: 3 Great Ways of Taking a Social Media Time-Out.

Social Media London is a community and monthly meetup featuring expert social media speakers, proudly powered by Link Humans.

photo by: futureshape
Filed Under: Blogging, Monthly, Social Media London Tagged With:

How NOT to Pitch Bloggers with Your Products and Services

How NOT to Pitch Bloggers with Your Products and Services

If you’re a blogger, do you ever get pitched by marketers and PR folks? I’ve had enough of bad practice in this department and here is my rant on the topic.


Do you agree with me or am I being too harsh? Please let me know what you reckon!

Related: How I’m Tweaking My Blogging Strategies this Year.

Filed Under: Blogging, Rant, Video Tagged With: , ,
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