Still stuck on Drupal 7?
Boost your digital platform and migrate to Drupal’s next generation CMS now!
It’s all change in the Drupal ecosystem and the world of digital transformation. Change that requires some big thinking and swift action. The pandemic accelerated digital transformation: more people online, more often. Making the need for great content - and flexible, easy to use content management systems (CMS) able to deliver better digital experiences to all users, more quickly and across all channels – even more critical.
When we wrote our Drupal white paper in 2020, Drupal 7 and 8 were planned for end-of-life (EOL) November 2022 and 2021 respectively; Drupal 10 wasn't even on the horizon. Now, Drupal 7's EOL has been pushed back until January 2025, and Drupal 10 launched in December 2022.
This updated white paper put together with Cyber-Duck’s hugely experienced Drupal team will help you understand what’s happening, the many benefits next generation Drupal offers, why migration is so vital, and how the migration can be achieved smoothly and effectively.
We do hope you enjoy the read. As always, if you’d like to get in touch or have any feedback, you can reach me at gareth@cyber-duck.co.uk.
Gareth Drew
Chief Technical Officer
Email: gareth@cyber-duck.co.uk
Drupal 8 is no longer receiving any updates, bug fixes or security patches from Drupal.org or the Drupal community. Drupal 9 is now three years old, with version 9.4 released in summer 2022, EOL planned for November 2023. Just in time to upgrade to Drupal 10, which launched on 14th December 2022 alongside Drupal 9.5. Drupal 10.1 is then open for development. It seems there will be three to five smaller updates between each major upgrade, roughly over a 2-year cycle. Largely in line with PHP and other third-party PHP libraries such as Symfony, Twig and Guzzle that post-Drupal 7 versions now heavily lean on; Drupal 9’s EOL coincides with Symfony 4’s EOL, for example.
Drupal 7 is where things have deviated from the plan. It's EOL date has now been pushed back until January 2025 - and according to the Drupal Association, this will be its final extension.
As of Spring 2023, almost exactly half of Drupal sites (c.450,000 thousand according to Drupal) are still Drupal 7 or below.
From a pure security perspective, there’s no immediate need to migrate from Drupal 7. But in functionality and benefits terms, it’s like staying on a diesel train or Apollo rocket, even as maglev trains and NASA’s SLS and Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets are both nearly ready to zoom off into the distance...
The short version is that more than half of all existing Drupal projects are still on Drupal 7 and didn’t make the migration to Drupal 8 or 9 at the rate that was first anticipated. And the pace of things didn’t seem to be picking up much. Given its open-source technology status, many projects are in government organisations, educational institutions, not-for-profits and other vital industries. Drupal.org simply felt it would “not be responsible to leave them vulnerable” without support and security. We agree it’s absolutely the right thing to do. For the time being, at least…
The pandemic didn’t help, with organisations forced to rework budgets and how they did business and projects. But this compounded a number of other underlying factors:
Although EOL for Drupal 7 has been pushed back to January 2025, it will happen. That means potential vulnerabilities or, in the worst- case scenario depending on what bugs occur, sites may stop working entirely! But there are other considerations that mean migration to next generation Drupal is a must:
If you’re still running Drupal 7, you have four options:
We recommend going with 1 at a minimum, but ideally 2. If you are effectively rebuilding your site anyway, why not take the extra time to consider how it’s performing for your users now and in the future? Once you have your next generation Drupal website, you have a great platform in place to start building all the additional functionality you’ve probably been after, but which seemed so difficult or costly on Drupal 7.
Back in 2020, Drupal recommended upgrading to Drupal 8 ahead of 9 in stages, but now Drupal recommends going to the current version. Because going from Drupal 9 to 10 is simply an update not a replatform, it’s more a question of planning for your migration away from Drupal 7 generally. Either direct to Drupal 10, or to Drupal 9 and then ensuring you update to 10 by Drupal 9’s proposed EOL in November 2023. But don't worry, the migration from D9 to D10 is simple.
One big caveat here is tangential but critical. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is also EOL as of 15th June 2022 (the default Microsoft browser is now Microsoft Edge) and Drupal 10 will no longer support this. This means many public sector sites may be forced to stick on Drupal 9, rather than upgrade earlier as so many of their workstations use IE11. Either way, it’s about giving yourself plenty of time to meet deadlines and plan for the new reality.
Even though it's clear there are many "negative" reasons to be concerned about the future of Drupal 7 sites, such as security and hosting, we think migrating to next generation Drupal should be viewed as a brilliant opportunity for organisations to improve their digital experience. In the long-run, you'll also be saving money which would otherwise be spent on maintaining and hosting an unsupported site with specialists.
Technology constantly improves and gains new features. Think of NASA’s new space craft Orion. Previous space craft got people to the moon. But Orion has features to take it to Mars and beyond: fuel cells replaced by solar arrays, lighter yet larger crew module, able to dock with multiple space crafts, far higher speeds. All the investment is paying off in reusability and efficiency.
Using this analogy, Drupal 7 is an old generation space shuttle. It's constrained as to how far it can go and how fast it can get there, even though it will fly with lot of specialist attention.
Similarly, the digital world has changed immeasurably since Drupal 7 was launched over a decade ago. What people expect from their user experience and interface has fundamentally shifted. Mobile is winning the Internet war - now accounting for more than half of global web site traffic, and everyone now expects to use great software that helps them work more enjoyably and efficiently, wherever they are.
Concerns about digital carbon emissions (now greater than the aviation industry) are coming to the forefront, meaning the kind and weight of content in your site and how it’s designed to minimise environmental impact is increasingly important. In some countries, like France, it's becoming legally essential. Add to that, massive changes in Google’s search environment, mean reconsidering SEO in the round is vital. All of which means it’s a great time to make positive changes.
It’s possible to migrate to next generation Drupal using experienced in-house development resource. But since it's effectively a rebuild, it's a big process in terms of time and money. You want to get it right first time, and having a trusted partner is vital to achieving this.
In the time since we wrote the first version of this white paper, we’ve used our combined
100 years-plus of Drupal development experience to migrate, update and redesign numerous projects to Drupal 9 including the Commonwealth, Sport England, College of Policing and housing group Sanctuary, who look to trusted Drupal partners for their projects. From this experience, we have refined a three (or ideally four)-step approach to next generation Drupal migration:
It’s best to take a phased approach that gives you time to assess and adjust at each stage. Every Drupal project is different, but migrations include most, if not all, of the following stages:
1. Technical audit
The audit assesses what needs doing. It examines the site or sites to establish core functionality, custom code and content.
The audit will:
You’ll also want to consider:
This part of the process sounds simple, but we know from experience that it’s not. Mapping every module’s functionality is time-consuming, complex and requires technical expertise. Depending on the complexity of your site or indeed sites, this could take anything from 2 to 10+ days. It’s also common for new clients to come with us with a list of pain points. This is a great time to examine those and see whether we can’t resolve those immediately. This is also a good opportunity to consider what of these modules might benefit from elements of automation that haven’t been utilised before. It might mean generating post-purchase or user profile creation or newsletter signup confirmation email, for example.
2. Content audit
Migration is the ideal time to do a Content Audit, assessing your content for quality, relevancy, and deciding if it needs to be replaced or even deleted. You might have a third-party forum that’s fallen out of use since the rise of social media. Perhaps you have content that’s out of date (just as we’re updating this paper), or in inaccessible formats. You may have new legal obligations around accessibility or data protection (such as GDPR) that affect the content and user data you currently hold. Auditing this content will help bring improvements in user experience, SEO, sustainability and efficiency.
The backbone of Drupal’s content architecture are its content types and taxonomies. These must be examined to determine whether they all need to be migrated to your new site, or whether you can use some of the new functionality and power of Drupal 9 to combine or replace some of them. We’ll work closely with you to decide how best to bring across content from non-Drupal websites; for example, Drupal’s migration script allows for the easy migration of content from Wordpress sites, which are commonly used for quick non-critical corporate websites.
During our work with Sport England, we audited thousands of pages of content. Having created a brand new information architecture (IA), we collaborated to determine:
For the College of Policing. we restructured over a million words of critical content concerned with best practice policing guidance.
3. Seeing the bigger picture – UX audit and user research
This isn’t a necessity, but it is a huge opportunity to review and rework your site, so that it meets your organisation and user needs both now and into the future. It can also help maximise the ROI of the migration itself.
Perhaps your organisation has grown to include stakeholders or business areas that are currently dealt with by multiple sites or microsites. Maybe your organisation’s brand or mission has evolved, and the site’s IA, content and user journeys do not support this. Undertaking user research to decide on the UX strategy at this stage offers maximum benefits and is far more effective than trying to do it after the fact.
Our work with Sanctuary housing group, is a great example of how this can work in practice consolidating 12 Drupal 7 sites of different sub-brands and operational areas into one easy to manage, consistently branded, accessible Drupal 9 platform.
4. Keep getting found – SEO audit
One of the biggest concerns of any migration, particularly if you are planning to reconsider content and site architecture, is ensuring that you don't lose the SEO equity built up by your previous site. There’s no point having a shiny next generation Drupal site if it can’t be found!
This means content mapping is an important part of the process; factoring in data such as pages with high traffic levels, pages with external backlinks and pages that rank highly for targeted keywords. It's important to ensure the SEO value of these pages are maintained during the migration. It's critical to have a robust redirect plan in place for the migration, including redirecting all current URLs to the new website (using 301 redirects); reviewing any historical redirects from previous website versions to eliminate redirect chains. Also updating Google Search Console to help monitor how old URLs are being removed and new URLs being added to Google’s index and considering an update plan for all internal and external links.
When Cyber-Duck redesigned and consolidated Sport England’s Drupal site it was vital to ensure its custom short URLs and all existing urls were mapped and redirected to the right place – ensuring its link and SEO equity as retained. The result was a 613% increase in traffic since the redesign.
5. Migration
We’ll collaborate closely with you throughout the entire process. Once the migration plan has been agreed, this can be achieved in a few days if there are no major changes to the information architecture, UI and content. This will of course increase depending on whether there is a website consolidation, significant redesign, UX or SEO strategy work. Or indeed all three! The next step is the replatforming itself. We’ll build a next generation Drupal website from scratch using the best UX, UI and development principles.
Many sites will have bespoke modules coded specifically for the needs of that site. There are lots of things that Drupal 7 could not do, that may now be run of the mill for a next generation Drupal website. We’ll re-create any custom functionality, leaning towards a next generation Drupal solution first and a bespoke solution where necessary.
The themes for Drupal 7 and next generation Drupal are also very different. That means all the website’s HTML templates need to be converted manually. Your theme – which controls the HTML and front-end presentation – will need to be rebuilt from the ground up, because Drupal's new theming layer is completely different from Drupal 7's. (This is another reason why it’s worth considering a redesign – the front-end coding lift is significant anyway.)
As we’ve said, this process means it’s the perfect moment to re-visit, add or remove content, particularly for those all-important landing pages. The process is iterative, meaning you can migrate content over section by section. The process can be re-run to bring across the very latest content from the old site, just before you launch the new one.
6. Review
The migration isn’t the end of the process. To ensure your new site is fully functional, there’s a stringent UAT (user acceptance testing) and QA (quality assurance) process to make sure the replatforming has caught everything and that it all looks and works as it should. This includes a rigorous test of all the site's functionality.
The new site will be more accessible than the old one, but we also recommend an independent accessibility audit, and the stages site with migrated content is a great place to do that.
As you can see, the migration process from Drupal 7 to next generation Drupal is a big step - the whole environment has changed. Drupal 9 is now very mature, so the risks that were present at first at its launch in 2020 have largely been mitigated. But there are always still risks depending on your project and the functionality and modules that have been implemented. That’s why the initial audit stages are so crucial: it will establish the scale and risk of the entire migration, allowing you to approach the upgrade with certainty and clarity.
The great strength of Drupal is its flexibility. Because it’s open-source, with core, community-contributed and custom modules and themes, each site is different. So it’s hard to give a ballpark figure – it could range from £75,000 to £500,000+. We usually engage with clients on a one-off consultancy audit for a few days to analyse the site and deliver a more accurate migration plan and budget, so there is no long-term commitment at this first stage.
It also depends on whether you want a like-for-like replacement of your old website content and functionality, or if you see it – like us – as a brilliant opportunity to review your site and improve its design and user experience. Your business is likely to have moved on considerably since it was built and if you do embrace the power of next generation Drupal to deliver an enhanced digital experience, that will also affect the effort and time taken to do it.
You might choose a phased approach, bringing across critical content and functionality first and then looking to add secondary content from your old website later, particularly applicable for very large sites. And to achieve this, we can provide a phased content migration strategy. You may launch a more focused website first and then look to add the new functionality you’ve always wanted later. We may also have some great ideas for your website that you’d never even considered!
Of course, set against this is the undoubted cost and risk of maintaining an out-of-date Drupal 7 site as we’ve explained above. Whether that’s pure security risk, brand risk from a poor user experience, unhappy content management colleagues, lack of developers able to support you, inefficiencies or more besides.
We believe on balance it is most definitely worth it, and that's why we’re happy to advise you on a bespoke approach that fits your organisation.
Cyber-Duck is a specialist at re-platforming and setting up new enterprise level CMS for institutions, corporates, and public bodies, boosting their digital presence and user experience. But don’t just take our word for it, dip a toe in with a migration audit and find out how. To get a free estimate go to our contact page and send us your details.
Contact: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/contact-us
A bit more about us and Drupal
Established in 2005, Cyber-Duck is a leading digital transformation agency that makes digital experiences better through strategic UX design and proven open-source technology implementation. Blending an ISO-accredited design process with lean and agile management principles, we deliver innovative digital solutions helping organisations to work more effectively and transform their relationships with customers, colleagues, suppliers, and the community. We have won numerous sought-after awards including Webby, UXUK and The Drum's DADI Awards for our work whether that’s improving e-commerce performance or creating accessible, inclusive, user experiences.
The Cyber-Duck team has been working with Drupal since 2005 when it selected the Drupal CMS as its main platform to develop websites. Since then Cyber-Duck has taken strides, using Drupal for clients like Sport England, Commonwealth, College of Policing, Oscar Kilo, Sanctuary Group. Cyber-Duck puts a huge emphasis on accessibility both in content and within the UX of each project. In addition to being a Drupal Premium Supporting Partner, as an Acquia Silver partner, Cyber-Duck is able to leverage its products like Lift for personalisation, Campaign Studio for CRM, Campaign Factory for marketing automation, Site Studio for low code theming and layout building, and many others including the upcoming Code Studio, a continuous integration tool.
The following contributors from Cyber-Duck were involved in the research and preparation of this white paper.
Drupal Specialists
Wider team members
Whatever the project or particular challenge you have in mind, we’re here with the right people, process and technology to help deliver the transformation you need.