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Case study

Drupal 7 to 8 Modernisation

Planned and delivered the migration of a healthcare marketing platform spanning more than 6,000 pages from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, adapting templates, automating visual regression, and improving performance through caching.

My role
Migration planning, test automation, and performance
Context
Healthcare digital platform modernisation, July 2019 to February 2020, covering more than 6,000 content and search pages.
Tech stack
Drupal 7, Drupal 8, PHP, JavaScript, Node.js, Visual Regression

Problem

A large healthcare marketing platform had to move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 without losing thousands of content and search pages, breaking established templates, or turning visual comparison into an unbounded manual exercise.

Constraints

  • More than 6,000 content and search pages had to remain available through the migration.
  • Templates had to be adapted to a new Drupal generation while preserving customer-facing behavior.
  • Visual coverage had to scale beyond practical page-by-page manual testing.
  • Performance work had to account for caching behavior as well as frontend output.

Approach

  • Planned the data migration and the sequence for adapting templates to Drupal 8.
  • Separated reusable template work from content migration so each stream could be reviewed clearly.
  • Created a sitemap-driven visual regression workflow to compare the large public surface systematically.
  • Used caching strategies and repeatable performance checks as part of migration acceptance.

Architecture decisions

  • Used the sitemap as the coverage inventory for automated visual comparison.
  • Kept template adaptation explicit instead of masking platform differences behind brittle compatibility code.
  • Treated caching as an architectural performance layer with its own validation needs.

Trade-offs

  • Broad visual automation made regressions visible at scale, but meaningful differences still required human triage.
  • Aggressive caching improved delivery speed while making invalidation behavior an important part of correctness.

Impact

  • Migrated more than 6,000 content and search pages within the documented July 2019 to February 2020 project window.
  • Automated visual regression reduced the manual comparison burden across the public site.
  • The LinkedIn project record reports a 300% performance improvement attributed to the caching strategy.

What I learned

  • Large platform migrations need an inventory that can drive both delivery and verification.
  • Performance, templates, content, and test automation have to move as one modernisation programme.