How the Drupal to Enterprise WordPress move helped Her Campus grow without breaking.

Challenge

Her Campus is the number one digital publication for college women in the US. Founded in 2009, the platform runs a network of chapters across university campuses and publishes content across lifestyle, career, wellness and culture. At its scale, thousands of users post content every day, making platform reliability and editorial usability non-negotiable. When it came time to move from Drupal to Enterprise WordPress, Her Campus needed a partner who understood digital publishing at this level.

Her Campus’s original site was built on Drupal 7. Eventually, it became clear that the platform could no longer keep up with the demands of a modern media organisation. The signs were hard to ignore: Core Web Vitals scores were sitting in the bottom 10% for Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), load speeds were sluggish, and editorial tools were holding the team back.

From Drupal to Enterprise WordPress: built for performance

The Drupal to Enterprise WordPress migration brought 11 years of content across with zero downtime and no disruption to the thousands of contributors publishing every day.

Zero-downtime content migration

Moving 500,000 articles, 45,000+ authors, 200,000+ tags, and hundreds of chapters is no small task. So instead of a big bang launch, an iterative migration process brought over a decade of content across in stages, keeping risk low and the site running for the thousands of contributors publishing every day.

A redesign built for engagement

What started as a like-for-like rebuild evolved into something bigger. WordPress’s flexibility made it possible to build a fully custom theme alongside Her Campus’s in-house designer, modernising the brand and improving the user experience across devices. Cross-linking tools gave editors more control over content discovery, and page views nearly doubled as a result.

A Drupal to WordPress migration that fixed AdTech from the ground up

Her Campus’s Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) scores were sitting in the bottom 10% on their old platform. WordPress’s open architecture made it possible to build a custom Google Ad Manager integration from scratch, enabling lazy loading and single request architecture for ad calls. The result: Her Campus moved from the bottom 10% to the top 10% for CLS.

Key Stats

Quote

“Load speed was cut in half and all of the scores we use to evaluate site health, such as engagement and page views, almost doubled.”

DAVE LIEVENSE, DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT ENGINEERING & IT, HER CAMPUS MEDIA