The still widely used 7th version of the Drupal CMS will reach End Of Life on November 1, 2023, then all Drupal 7 sites will become potentially vulnerable as they won't receive any security updates. Even if the community would prolong the support once again, the technology stack powering Drupal 7 sites is usually outdated, so keeping Drupal 7 sites in production is becoming more and more risky and painful which is very understandable in the light of the age of Drupal 7: it was released first in 2011!
This post outlines our process of upgrading Drupal 7 sites to Drupal 10.
Our standardized Drupal 7 to 10 migration steps are grouped into two phases:
PHASE 1
Audit: predictable effort, and cost, "clickable" result.
- Discovery of business needs and related functionality, usually 1-2 meetings.
- Audit of implementation including integrations.
- Content migration test resulting in a working Drupal 10 instance.
This will include nodes, media, files, taxonomies, users, and everything else the automated migration tools can handle, such as clean URLs to retain SEO. Multilingual content will be also migrated using automated tools. - Recommendations, consultation, and estimations.
PHASE 2
Drupal 10 upgrade based on the client's decisions.
- UX-centered redesign - optional, but recommended, see the next point.
- Frontend implementation. Due to the technological shift even if the design would remain the same this couldn't be avoided.
- Backend feature implementation to replace deprecated solutions and adapt to current needs.
- Final content migration.
- Go-live.
- Continuous support, maintenance, and further development on-demand.
Useful modules if you'd like to do it with your own team:
Time remaining for completing your Drupal 7 to 10 migration project:
Get a quote for your Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 migration
Please provide us with the URL and main characteristics of your Drupal 7 site and we will get back to you with a detailed fixed-price offer.
- Amount of content (approximately).
- Number of users.
- Integrations such as an external search service, a CRM, or a newsletter provider.
Benefits of staying with Drupal.
With Drupal 10 it's more true than ever that Drupal is the best open-source CMS for the enterprise. It's a secure platform well-suited for complex, heavily customized, high-performance websites, web apps, and decoupled solutions also. It's unbeatable when it comes to multilingual capabilities. Drupal.org states that it's still the best digital experience platform(DXP) on the web.
Drupal 10 is a long-term solution
It's packed with modern features such as the CKeditor 5 WYSIWYG editor and is built on top of the latest Symfony 6 components with 4 years of security support. This foundation makes Drupal 10 a good candidate for becoming the next LTS (Long Term Support) version of Drupal. The upgrades have become much easier since Drupal 8, so while there is no chance that Drupal 10 will live for 12 years as Drupal 7 did, it is a future-proof software, and the maintenance costs and risks of keeping new Drupal sites secure and up to date will get lower.
In a conclusion, Drupal 10 is highly recommended for long-term projects. Features and customizations will not require complete rewrites any time soon, only reasonable and predictable maintenance.
