Complete guide to migrating your Drupal website to Hugo. Leave Drupal's steep learning curve behind and get blazing fast builds. Free migration tool included.
You can migrate from Drupal to Hugo for free using LeaveWP. Enter your site URL, choose Hugo as the destination, and download your content — posts, pages, and media — in minutes. No API keys, passwords, or CLI tools required. Difficulty: Medium. Estimated time: 20-40 minutes.
Official docs: Drupal Documentation · Hugo Documentation
Enterprise PHP CMS for complex content architectures. Large organizations needing complex content structures and strict access control, but these limitations push teams toward modern alternatives.
Steep learning curve — requires developer expertise
This is the most common reason teams migrate away from Drupal. Hugo eliminates this issue entirely.
Fewer themes and modules compared to WordPress
With Hugo, blazing fast builds — renders 10,000 pages in seconds.
Major version upgrades (e.g. Drupal 7→10) are complex migrations
Modern architectures like Hugo are designed to avoid this from the ground up.
Slow without aggressive caching configuration
After migrating, you'll no longer need to worry about this — Hugo takes a fundamentally different approach.
Fastest static site generator, written in Go. Built with Go (Go templates), it's documentation sites and blogs where build speed and simplicity matter most.
Blazing fast builds — renders 10,000 pages in seconds
Single binary with zero dependencies
Built-in image processing, taxonomies, and i18n
Huge theme library for quick starts
Hugo is open-source and free to use. You own your code and data with no vendor lock-in. Deploy to any host that supports Go, or use managed platforms like Vercel and Netlify for zero-config deployments.
Side-by-side comparison based on real platform characteristics
| Metric | Drupal | Hugo |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of Use | ⭐⭐ 2/5 | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 |
| Performance | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 |
| Flexibility | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 |
| Cost | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 |
| Scalability | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4/5 | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 |
| Ecosystem | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 | ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5 |
| Language | PHP | Go (Go templates) |
| Pricing | Free (self-hosted) | Free (open-source) |
| Open Source | Yes | Yes |
Ratings are based on publicly available data, documentation, and community consensus as of 2026. Individual experience may vary.
A detailed breakdown of how your Drupal content maps to Hugo
What may need manual attention
Custom server-side logic, third-party integrations, and platform-specific plugins will need equivalent solutions in Hugo. The core content (text, images, metadata) transfers cleanly.
Migrate your content in three simple steps
Enter your Drupal site URL — LeaveWP connects automatically.
Select Hugo as destination and choose content options.
Download your migrated content or preview it in your browser.
Migrating from Drupal to Hugo makes the most sense if you're experiencing steep learning curve — requires developer expertise or outgrowing Drupal's architecture. Hugo is best for documentation sites and blogs where build speed and simplicity matter most.
You should migrate if: your Drupal site is slow, your hosting costs are climbing, you need developer flexibility, or you want to adopt a modern JAMstack architecture.
You might want to stay if: your Drupal site benefits from powerful content modeling with custom entity types and fields and you don't have Go developers on your team.
The migration itself is straightforward with LeaveWP — enter your Drupal URL, select Hugo, and download your content. The more important question is whether Hugo's architecture fits your team's skills and your project's long-term needs.
Explore more migration paths from Drupal or to Hugo
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