From Drupal 7 to Drupal 10: Nasha Gazeta News Portal Upgrade and Migration

Project Features

The project is very dynamic; every day, nodes are planned and published. There are two types of mailings: daily with a selection of articles and mailing of blog postings in French. The article's access purchase feature and subscription to paid content. The site is multilingual (Russian and French versions).

Website: https://nashagazeta.ch

Platform: Drupal 7

Data volume:

• 25000+ nodes (articles, blogs, books, events, dossiers, photo albums, etc.);
• 5000+ taxonomy terms;
• 2000+ comments;
• 13000+ registered users;
• 4000+ daily newsletter subscribers;
• 4500+ subscribers to the French blog;
• over 30,000 media data;
• 130+ modules, including a lot of custom code.

Reasons for migration

The main reasons for migration:

• Critical security risks – no security updates for Drupal 7 create a critical vulnerability for all content and user data;
• Slow site performance – long average page load time (unsatisfactory results of Google Page Insights values);
• Cost-Ineffective – an upgrade will further simplify support and reduce costs;
• Legacy Code – replacement of obsolete solutions, removal of accumulated "garbage" will provide the site with stability and get rid of errors occurring in unsupported contributed modules;
• Expanded opportunities – new web technologies, modules, and development practices simplify project growth.

Goal

Provide a smooth and seamless transition of the NashaGazeta.ch news portal from the outdated Drupal 7 platform to the modern version of Drupal 10 with full migration of functionality, content, and user experience.

Key Requirements:

• 100% content migration;
• Migrate all user accounts, preserve authorization credentials;
• Migrate media files, preserve referential integrity;
• Optimize and remove anything unnecessary;
• Eliminate dependency on unsupported modules;
• Adapt the design to modern standards, getting rid of a lot of duplicate page templates and code in them, unify the grid, add breadcrumbs, etc;
• Improve to the mobile version;
• Meet deadlines and budget.

Preparation phase

Before starting technical implementation, we conducted a comprehensive audit of the existing platform, which allowed us to develop a clear understanding of the work scope and potential complexities.

Key Audit Findings:

1. Drupal module analysis. A detailed registry of 130+ modules in use has been compiled.  45% of modules had no support in Drupal 10. We identified candidate modern modules analogs for replacement, obsolete components that can be abandoned, critical functions that require custom development;
2. Evaluation of the custom code. We ensured an absence of Drupal Core hacks (clean codebase). We audited 10 custom modules and planned to replace nearly 70% of the custom code with modern Drupal core and contributed modules and port to modern Drupal 10 API the rest of the legacy code;
3. Design and Drupal theme audit. Numerous problems were detected: inconsistent grid structure, large amount of irrelevant and outdated CSS styles, non-standard navigation menu implementation, excessive number of page templates with code, unoptimized UI/UX, other problems with technical and refactoring debt;
4. SEO audit. We proposed a set of recommendations on improving behavioral factors, optimize and fix technical aspects for Search Engine Optimization.

The results of the preliminary phase:

• A clear migration roadmap has been formed;
• Development priorities has been identified;
• Specifications for the replacement of obsolete components has been prepared;
• A realistic work plan has been proposed: budget – from 200 h., implementation period – 3 months.

Technical challenges and solutions

Problem: Drupal 7 article subscription has been implemented through the "PayPal for Payment" module and has no Drupal 10+ version;

Solution: implementation of paid content through Drupal Commerce and a number of additional modules (Commerce License, Commerce PayPal, etc.);

Problem: emailing to a large number of users after migration was unstable, mail not sent to all users;

Solution: we found a workaround fixing the entity relations in the database to use the Simplenews contrib module correctly;

Problem: previously used module for PDF generation was not supported for Drupal 10;

Solution: replaced with Printable module;

Migration results

Core Web Vitals performance and metrics have been improved, particularly LCP:

Number of pages with error: "LCP" value is too high: more than 4 sec. (mobile devices)

Number of pages with error: "LCP" value is too high: more than 4 sec. (desktop)

Reducing ineffective URLs to zero in both language versions of the site.

Dynamics of page quality (mobile version)

Dynamics of page quality (desktop)

Page load speeds improved, with Google Page Insights scores increasing to 88 on mobile and 90 on desktop.

Pagespeed score (mobile devices)

Pagespeed score (desktop)

Increased the number of Google-indexed pages by over 3 times.

Functional Improvements:

• The method of purchasing paid content access has been changed;
• Added breadcrumbs;
• Fixed menu operation;
• Site search has been improved;
• Unified Grid;
• The mobile version has been improved;
• Modern Theme based on the latest version of Bootstrap 5 library;
• New sliders for media content – Slick;
• Transition to entities;
• Getting rid of irrelevant code and styles.

The visual improvements can be seen in screenshots below:

Home page before the upgrade

Home page after the upgrade

Mobile version: left - before the move, right - after the move

Partition page before the upgrade

Partition page after upgrade

As a result, we successfully migrated a large multilingual news portal from Drupal 7 to 10, significantly boosting the SEO and site speed. During the last couple of years, we performed tens of such migrations and developed our methodology and skills for such projects to be successfully implemented.