Our approach on upgrading Drupal 7 sites to Drupal 10
The still widely used 7th version of the Drupal CMS reached End Of Life on January 5, 2025, now all Drupal 7 sites are potentially vulnerable as they don't receive any security updates. The technology stack powering Drupal 7 sites is usually outdated, so keeping Drupal 7 sites in production is becoming more and more risky and painful which is very understandable in the light of the age of Drupal 7: it was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 or 11.
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:
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.
Trust us, we are in the top 5% of Drupal agencies
BRAINSUM received the Drupal Certified Partner certification from the International Drupal Association. This is recognition for us continuously creating our Drupal projects at a high professional level and sustainably.
The Drupal Association determines this objectively based on a complex algorithm and only a small portion of Drupal vendors listed on drupal.org earned it.
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. Drupal 10 will be supported until mid-late 2026! The upgrades have also become much easier and more predictable since Drupal 8. Drupal 10 is a future-proof software, and the maintenance costs and risks of keeping new Drupal sites secure and up to date will keep getting 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.
