It’s time to upgrade your Drupal 7 website.

Drupal 7 reaches end of life in November 2022, which means websites built on this version of Drupal will require a ground-up rebuild to stay performant and secure. Find out more about what this means for your business and how to prepare your organization for the future.

[fa icon="plus-square"] What's going on with Drupal 7, 8, and 9?

Drupal continues to release new versions of its platform to provide site owners with the best possible experience. Drupal 9 will be released in summer 2020.

Drupal will be phasing out support for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 in November 2021. By then, Drupal 7 will be over a decade old, and the newer versions will have rendered it obsolete.

[fa icon="plus-square"] Why is it important for me to upgrade from D7?

After November 2021, Drupal will no longer support Drupal 7 with security patches, bug fixes, or feature enhancements.

The most critical change will be the elimination of security support for Drupal 7 websites.

This means vulnerabilities can be released publicly with no means of addressing them, which puts your site at immediate risk of cyber attack.

[fa icon="plus-square"] How challenging is it to migrate from one Drupal version to the next?

Due to the architectural differences between Drupal 8 and 9 and its predecessors, migrating web properties from Drupal 7 to a newer version requires a migration and a significant rebuild.


That being said, the release of Drupal 9 will be the first time the Drupal community uses a backwards-compatible upgrade, which means the transition from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 will be exceedingly simple.


This is why sites built on Drupal 7 (or earlier) can and should be rebuilt in Drupal 8, even before the release of Drupal 9: migrating to Drupal 9 will be as easy as upgrading from 8.x to 8.x+1.


Drupal has also declared that platform upgrades after 2021 will be "easy forever," so this will most likely be the last time an end of life announcement necessitates a complex migration/rebuild.

[fa icon="plus-square"] What's so great about Drupal 8?

Aside from the risks involved in not upgrading from Drupal 7, there are real benefits to building a site on Drupal 8 (and, eventually, Drupal 9).

Drupal 8 empowers both engineers and marketers to build more performant web experiences.

There are over 200 new features in Drupal 8, including:

  • An improved content authoring experience, with the ability to stage multiple pieces of content for simultaneous release
  • Layout Builder, which allows for custom, per-page arrangements of content
  • Workflows that allow for content moderation
  • Built-in support for multilingual and responsive websites
  • Native REST APIs
  • Reliable and consistent configuration importing and exporting
Plus, more modules (like Views and the WYSIWYG editor) have been moved into Drupal 8 core, which reduces your reliance on third party modules.
[fa icon="plus-square"] I think my site might be impacted by Drupal 7 end of life. What do I do next?

Knowledge is power.

First, read this blog post by our Director of Web Engineering Brian Thompson about the Drupal release timeline, which provides even more detail about the platform release schedule.

Then, contact our team for a free, easy web evaluation. We'll let you know which of your web applications are built on Drupal 7 or earlier and create a clear roadmap for upgrading to Drupal 8.