The question I get most from site builders right now is some version of this: "I built my site with Layout Builder. Can I move it to Drupal Canvas, and how long will it take?"
Yes, you can. And it takes less time than you think. I know because I just moved my own site and timed it.
What I moved
DrupalHelps.com was a typical Layout Builder site. Drupal 10, the DXPR theme, Layout Builder on every landing page, a handful of custom block types, and 6 stylesheets of custom CSS loaded through Asset Injector.
The new site runs Drupal 11, Drupal Canvas and Jarvis, my free Canvas theme. Everything came across:
- 60 blog posts, on their original URLs
- 16 Layout Builder landing pages, rebuilt as Canvas pages
- 264 media items: images, YouTube and Vimeo videos, PDFs and audio, about 510 MB of files
- 14 topics, the main menu, the footer and 3 webforms
I directed the move and Claude Code did the hands-on build. The live site was never touched. Everything was read from it, and nothing was written to it.
The clock
The first complete working copy of the site took about 40 minutes of build time. That's every post, every page, every image and every form, running on Canvas, branded, with the menus and footer in place.
Then I checked it the boring way. Of the 108 URLs on the old site, 107 loaded a page on the new one. The missing one was the search page, which I hadn't built yet. Canvas reported zero component errors.
Your site will be different. The next section explains why mine went that fast.
Why it was fast
The content came out through Drupal's front door. Drupal's JSON:API hands you posts, media and terms as structured data. Layout Builder layouts don't come out cleanly that way, so those pages were read from their rendered HTML instead. Nothing needed a database export or access to the live server.
Layout Builder blocks map cleanly to the Canvas components in Jarvis (our Canvas based theme). A banner becomes a Hero. A section with a background becomes a 2 or 3 Column layout in the same colors. Text, buttons, images, videos, stats, cards and maps each have a matching component. Forms and Views listings come across as blocks you place in Canvas. Once the mapping is set, every page follows it.
The brand moved into settings, not CSS. My colors and fonts went into the Jarvis theme settings. No stylesheet had to be rewritten to make the new site look like DrupalHelps.
The whole site is a recipe. Every piece of content, configuration and layout lives in files. I can drop the database and rebuild the entire site from nothing in a few minutes. So the move can be run again and again until it's right.
What took longer than the move
The move was the fast part. Here's where the rest of the time went, and it's what you should plan for.
Deciding what the site should say now. Moving a site is a good time to rethink it. I rewrote my home page and the Jarvis landing page while I was there. That's not migration work, but it's the work that made the new site better than the old one.
Finding problems that were already there. Old content has old bugs. The footnote links in my longest posts had never worked, on the live site, for years. A move makes you look at everything, and you find things.
Smoothing the theme for a real site. A real site with years of content finds edge cases a demo never will. DrupalHelps turned up a handful of gaps in Jarvis: listing pages that needed styling, a share module that doesn't work inside Canvas, and a few smaller things. Each one is fixed in Jarvis itself now, so the next site doesn't hit them.
The pieces that don't convert on their own. Each of these needs a decision from you:
- Custom CSS. My 6 Asset Injector stylesheets didn't come across. Each style gets a decision: drop it, replace it with a theme setting, or carry it over.
- Search, if your old site had a search page.
- Anything that needs an API key, like an AI chatbot or reCAPTCHA.
- Email handlers on forms, and redirects. These aren't visible from outside the old site, so they're moved by hand.
None of these are hard. They just can't be decided by a script.
What decides how long yours takes
Your site isn't mine, so here's what moves the number:
- How many Layout Builder pages you have. Posts and media move in bulk. Layout pages each get mapped to components.
- How much custom CSS you rely on. Theme settings cover brand colors and fonts. Heavy custom styling takes longer to carry over.
- Custom block types and custom code. Standard blocks map straight to components. Anything custom needs its own work.
- Integrations. Search, CRM forms, payments, anything with an API key.
- How much you want to change. A straight move is quick. A move plus a redesign is a project.
How we'd move your site
This is the process I'd use on yours, because it's the one I used on mine:
- Inventory. Count your content, Layout Builder pages, block types, CSS and integrations, so the estimate is real.
- Move a copy, never the original. Your live site stays untouched until you're happy with the new one.
- Build it as a recipe. Your new site can be rebuilt from files at any point, so every fix is repeatable.
- Check every URL. Every old address should load a page on the new site, or redirect to one.
- Review it together. You see your real content on Canvas before anything goes live.
So, can you move?
Yes. If your site runs on Layout Builder with custom block types today, you can be on Drupal Canvas without starting over. Your content comes with you, your URLs stay the same, and your editors get a drag-and-drop page builder with a live preview.
DrupalHelps is running on it now. You can see Jarvis at jarvis.drupalhelps.com, and download the free Jarvis Handbook to see what your editors would be working with.
If you want help moving your site, that's what we do. Tell us about your site and we'll give you a real estimate.