Drupal 7 is sunsetting on January 5th, 2025 reaching its official end of life.  

So what does that mean for you if your website is being powered by Drupal 7?  First off, your site will continue to work as it does now.  The fact that support for Drupal 7 is ending doesn’t mean things will break and not work anymore.  The reality is that there will no longer be community support on the project or the modules so after January 5th the likelihood of security threats and bugs begins to creep up exponentially.

There are a few options you can consider, and we have helped a number of other people in your same shoes make informed decisions on next steps.  

1. Leave the site as it is for now, but begin to plan 

This is the least recommended but since January is right around the corner it may be the most practical if you haven’t begun the process of what to do next.  The reality is your site will likely be ok for the first few months after support ends.  I will caveat this by saying that as part of this step is to begin to plan for a migration off of Drupal 7.  Strategically begin to work out a timeframe for you, and I would recommend having a version of your next site off of D7 before the end of Q1, so end of March 2025.  One thing to note though is if you need to be compliant with FedRAMP, PCI, HIPAA, SOC 2, etc they will no longer be valid after January 5th because of this.  

2. As-is migration to Drupal 11

This approach is to take your current website and migrate it as-is into Drupal 11.  This means the backend structure and configurations are evaluated in an audit and then any custom modules or unsupported contributed modules will need to be refactored as part of this effort.  Finally the theme will need to be replatformed into Drupal’s newer Twig templating engine.  We have a lot of experience here to help guide you through this process.  Depending on how your site is configured I would estimate a 1-3 month turn around for something like this, which means there’s likely still time to address this.  While this approach would work as a band-aid, there will likely be some technical debt brought over as well, but that could be worked around.  

3. Redesign / Rebuild

This is clearly the longer term approach.  The opportunity here is to reevaluate what you have live currently and identify a newer approach to better communicate your brand, and also to modernize any technologies under the hood.  Want a new modern look and feel?  Want to refactor your website to be more of a content repository and then sending that information out to different additional endpoints like a mobile app or 3rd party blog?  All of these things are on the table.  Clearly this would be the most time consuming portion, and could be handled in addition to line items 1 or 2.

Next Steps

Drupal has come a long way since Drupal 7 was released back in 2011.  In that time it has grown into one of the most powerful CMS systems on the market, the only open-source one in the Gartner and Forrester reports as a top performer, and has gotten even easier to use.  Reach out if you have any questions or concerns and we’d love to help!

Read more on the Drupal 7 sunsetting here: https://www.drupal.org/psa-2023-06-07