Orchestrated A Seamless Website Migration For Optimal User Experience

Requirement

The client wanted to:

• Migrate from ‘end of life’ Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.
• Enhance editorial experience - right from generating content to publishing it on the website.
• Optimize their huge database of tables to produce fresh content and update existing content with ease.
• Automate the import process of large datasets.
• Improve the API response time and subsequently, enhance application performance to quickly access and retrieve information.

Challenges 

The client was facing database management challenges and performance-related issues:

• Usage of Drupal 7 along with a lot of customizations required continuous maintenance of the custom codebase.
• The automated migration process took weeks to run because of the multitude of fields in D7.
• The low performance of the D7 system failed to meet current business needs.
• System inability to simultaneously handle content updates by different users led to the repetitive efforts of saving the records.
• As the system required manual intervention in uploading content, it took approximately 2-3 days to import/update a large set of data in the CSV file format.
• Low API response time led to poor application performance.

Solution

We created a roadmap to migrate the client’s website from D7 to D8. The proof of concept ensured that their business needs are met using Drupal 8 core capabilities and contributed modules with minimal customization. We also recommended the following measures: 

• An efficient data structure with custom entities to manage huge datasets.
• Use of improved D8 database structure to reduce the number of tables. 
• Enhance the editorial experience for in-house content editors.
• Proposed ways to improve API performance and fix issues of degradation due to increased load.
• Expose the APIs to third parties (universities and colleges) to allow them to perform tasks, such as form filling, much faster.
• Utilize a better import process for large datasets (30000 records each).

Our Approach

We worked closely with the client to carve a migration strategy that addressed these issues successfully:

• End-of-Life D7 - As D7 was approaching end of life, we provided them a strategy to migrate their website to D8 on PHP 7.3 and MySQL 5.7. This allowed them to leverage new functionalities and achieve better web performance.
• Application performance - The use of Elasticsearch indexing to store, search, and analyze huge amounts of data and receive responses in milliseconds. 
• Editorial Experience - Integration of the Inline Entity forms module to edit referenced content. It breaks down one large request into multiple requests to reduce response time at the end of content update.
• Extensibility - Recommended the usage of robust migration plugins for migrating large sets of data from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.
• Scalability - Demonstrated the Publish/Subscribe model in CMS, so that peripheral systems can be integrated for any future business need.
• Improved Website Performance - Showed how Restful APIs can be used in small sets to reduce the request turnaround time.
• Managed enormous datasets - Suggested the use of field UI field with custom entities and other base fields to reduce the number of tables.
   

Benefit

• Increased editor efficiency. They can now generate, edit, and update content much faster.
• Faster API response - from 8-9 seconds to 0.5-0.6 milliseconds.
• Minimal code maintenance. 
• Reduce the time to run the semi-automated import process to less than a day with negligible manual intervention.
• Improved system scalability to accommodate new datasets, handle higher traffic, and manage new business requirements.