Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9

When to upgrade to Drupal 9?

Whichever route you choose—whether migrating via Drupal 8 or directly to Drupal 9—you will need to start the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 sooner or later. Both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 were originally set to reach their end of life in November 2021. However, this was postponed in the summer to November 21, 2022, because too many websites were still running on Drupal 7. So, you have 2 more years to plan and execute the migration before facing security risks tied to the end of official Drupal security support.

Still, now is the right time to get started. You’ll want to continue optimizing your application, and it would be a waste to invest heavily in your Drupal 7 application while a migration is on the horizon. But what about waiting for a later, more stable version of Drupal 9, you might ask? This is a common question among many CMS providers, but it doesn’t apply to the Drupal 9 upgrade. The underlying code that powers Drupal 9 has already been present in Drupal 8 for quite some time. Drupal 8 essentially served as a pilot for Drupal 9. In Drupal 9, no core changes were introduced that directly impact application functionality—any bugs or issues were already resolved during the Drupal 8 cycle.

Upgrading via Drupal 8

Before Drupal 9 was released this year, the best path for Drupal 7 sites was to migrate to Drupal 8. The big advantage of the evolution from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is that updating from a later version of Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.0 feels more like an incremental upgrade rather than the massive replatforming effort that earlier Drupal migrations required. Sites that migrated to Drupal 8 before Drupal 9’s release could benefit from the simple upgrade path from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

Migrating to Drupal 8 can still be a good option for Drupal 7 sites, even though Drupal 9 has been released. The reason is that essential modules or themes you depend on may not yet be available for Drupal 9. Since the upgrade path from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 for most modules and themes should be relatively straightforward, many of them should be ready quickly. However, some exceptions might take longer. In the meantime, you can tackle the heavy lifting of migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 now and then take advantage of the easier upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 later, once all necessary modules are Drupal 9–ready.