If your website or web application is powered by Drupal, and it is not yet updated to Drupal 10, your website is out of date and is at higher risk of a security breech as these older versions or Drupal are now no longer supported. Drupal 7 EOL (“End of Life”) does not mean your website will stop functioning. In fact, you may not see any impact whatsoever. What EOL for an opensource project means is that the developer community (more specifically its dedicated core maintainer team) is no longer supporting the software: Periodic security scans and fixes are no longer made available.
You have three, logical choices:
- Monitor for and manually apply updates or hire Recovery Kit to update or migrate your Drupal site to the latest, supported version
- Engage in a long term contract with HeroDevs for their “Never-Ending (Drupal) Support”
- Cross your fingers and hope all continues to go well
Additional benefits of keeping Drupal core up-to-date
In addition to keeping your platform software safe and secure with the latest security updates (and they are released regularly for minor fixes and off-schedule for highly critical ones), you will not be unexpectedly tripped-up by host PHP updates which can affect your users’ site experience, or worse, completely break your website. Keeping your website Drupal core and contributed modules up to date helps ease applying future updates as well.
How much does it cost to update my Drupal website?
There are so many variables to consider! For some frame of reference, the actual updating (upgrading) of Drupal core for minor versions might technically be as simple as issuing the commands:
composer update "drupal/core-*" --with-all-dependencies
drush updb -y
drush cr(see official docs: https://www.drupal.org/docs/updating-drupal/updating-drupal-core-via-composer#s-update-drupal-core-code), but it is unlikely that this alone will do the whole job in one fell swoop, it is not recommended to perform any updates without first capturing a backup, and it won’t work for Drupal 7 to 10 updates. Further, Recovery-Kit always prefers to work in a separate environment from your live, production site just in case something goes wonky or additional, time-consuming steps are required along the way which might introduce unnecessary downtime for your website visitors.
The leap from Drupal 7 to 8/9/10 is significant.
- Drupal core has fundamentally changed its foundation.
- Latest Drupal core (and modules) requires PHP 8 which might not yet be enabled on your current host
- Many popular modules and themes are either deprecated or require a little more elbow grease (ex. ckeditor)
- Any custom* modules and themes are very likely not ready for Drupal 10 and will need to be reviewed and updated
* Custom is a mixed bag but can also be evaluated for upgradeability.
Should I just migrate to a new platform or even start over?
Recovery-Kit focuses on in-place website upgrades to minimize risk, time to completion, and expense. However, we can help guide you in this decision and help you in your next steps: Performing an update/upgrade may be an opportune time to remove old website cruft, reassess priorities, introduce a new design, and even migrate off of your Drupal site altogether if that is what is best for your business.
Get in touch, and let’s talk!