Is your website still running on Drupal 7?
Beware, Drupal 7 will stop receiving security support as of January 5th 2025.
It is strongly recommended to upgrade your Drupal 7 website to Drupal 11 before January 5th 2025, to ensure your website remains stable, secure and capable of representing your business reliably.
What happens if you choose to decline an upgrade and instead to continue running Drupal 7?
- Security issues: From January 5 2025 Drupal 7 websites will stop receiving security updates and support. This will make your Drupal 7 website vulnerable to hacking attempts and cyber attacks. It will not take long for cyber criminals to find Drupal 7 websites that are no longer secure.
- Reliability issues: Drupal 7 is quite old now, with few agencies able to meaningfully support it. This leads to dated modules and features that don’t support your team and clients as effectively as a Drupal 10 or 11 website will, making the site slower and less reliable as a result.
- Compliance issues. For some companies, Drupal 7, once no longer receiving security updates, compliance will become a factor for consideration.
What’s recommended?
Upgrade Drupal 7 to Drupal 11.
This is the safest and most effective method of resolving the issues that will be presented when Drupal 7 becomes end of life. Doing so will give you continuous support, access to the newest security updates, and advanced Drupal features.
While Drupal 10 is a fantastic CMS, it is now superseded by Drupal 11, and we recommend migrating straight from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11, which was released in August 2024, with great new features across content management, website building, upgrading and maintaining Drupal applications.
Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 – an overview
Stage 1: Assess current Drupal 7 site
The first step to upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 is to assess your current Drupal 7 site.
Upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 is essentially a complete site rebuild – from a development perspective.
Key aspects of Stage 1:
- Review current, compiling a list of all pages, content, features and functionality
- Confirm all content will be migrating, and begin considering page/URL forwarding concepts
- Identify potential issues that might come up during the upgrade, such as custom modules that aren’t compatible with Drupal 11
- Confirm the current hosting environment supports Drupal 11
Stage 2: Evaluate and Plan the upgrade path from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11
- Setup development and staging environments
- Confirm all content migration plans
- Map old URLs to new URLs and define forwarding technique (301 recommended)
- Confirm key dates and entire project timeline, including key milestones and client user acceptance testing
- Confirm all modules will work with Drupal 11 and for those that will not, develop a plan for a suitable replacement
- Review all contributed modules’ compatibility with Drupal 11
- Check the status of all modules to confirm they’re still supported
- Make a list of any custom modules — these will need to be rebuilt in Drupal 11, replaced with core or contributed modules, or removed altogether if no longer required
Stage 3: Create Drupal 11 site with contributed modules
- Create a fresh Drupal 11 site to add all modules and content structures.
- Configure all modules and test.
- Create the content structures required for the migration including content types, block types, vocabularies, media types, menus, etc, following current best practices for Drupal 11.
- Where required, rework the structure of the pages, to add or remove fields and leverage new features such as Layout Builder etc.
Stage 4: Upgrade your custom modules
- Perform an upgrade of all custom modules, keeping Drupal 11 best practices in mind.
- Rationalise custom modules as much as possible
- Test the functionality
Stage 5: Migrate your data
For smaller sites, data can be “manually migrated” (using copy and paste) between sites. For larger sites this process is largely automated, with human oversight and validation.
- An audit across all content pages, images, files and other data must have been completed by this stage
- Delete and clean up content, images, files and other data on the Drupal 7 site before the migration, offering a clean base to start the migration process from
- Ensure the Drupal 7 core version is is the latest available
- Back up all data prior to starting the migration
- Freeze content changes on the Drupal 7 site
- Implement redirects and check any 404’s and resolve
- Test the Drupal 11 site to confirm the content and data has migrated across as expected
Stage 6: Rebuild the theme
- Rebuild the Drupal theme.
- Test the theme to make sure everything is working as expected
Stage 7: Test the site
- Perform comprehensive testing/QA across different devices and browsers to confirm the new site works as expected for a wide range of audiences.
- Site performance should be tested here too.
- Seek client user acceptance testing approval.
Stage 8: Launch new Drupal 11 site
- Select a launch date
- Freeze content updates and admin use of the Drupal 7 site
- Run any final incremental data migrations as needed from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 to pick up recent content updates
- Launch the new site
- Test the new site in production
- Check logs for any missing pages (404s) and other warnings and errors
- Check redirects
- Restrict access to Drupal 7 site
- Take complete backup of entire Drupal 7 site
Stage 9: Train team on new Drupal 11 site
Training of the team that will use the Drupal CMS.
Assistance with upgrading Drupal 7 to Drupal 11
Are you ready to upgrade from your Drupal 7 website to Drupal 11? This upgrade isn’t actually an upgrade, but in reality a complete site rebuild, as outlined above.
This upgrade however is the ideal time to review your website design and content, giving consideration for a refresh across both of these important aspects of your online brand.
Newpath has performed many Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 and Drupal 11 upgrades and has the experience and expertise to help you make this process a smooth and hassle free one. We’d love to chat with you about your upgrade and how we can help.
