It was recently announced that Drupal 7 will no longer be supported as of November 2021 which sent up a big firestorm throughout the Drupal community. If your website is in Drupal 7, you may not be feeling concerned since 2021 sure feels far away, right? Well you might want to start making plans and getting the budget together to make a migration. There are a lot of websites that will need to be upgraded and if you get down to the wire, you could be competing for your developer’s time and attention to make this move.

According to SooperThemes, there are about 800,000 websites currently on the Drupal 7 platform that will need to upgrade to Drupal 9, which will be released in June 2020. SooperThemes says that’s a big workload and there simply isn't enough Drupal developers to take it on. So getting a head start on migrating to Drupal 8 would be advisable, so your website doesn’t get left in the dust.

I bet you are wondering what’s the worst that can happen if you don’t upgrade your Drupal 7 website. End-of-life means that the version of Drupal will no longer be supported by the community. No more security updates will be released, no new bug fixes and websites can be flagged as unsupported or not secure by third party tools like, you guessed it, Google. Feeling the pending armageddon?

You also might be thinking to yourself that this is some sort of way for the Drupal community to cash in by forcing migrations. The reality is that Drupal 8 is three years old now, making D7 pretty ancient. It’s time to retire the older software so that the community can focus on creating better versions of Drupal that deliver more features with increased security. This meets the modern demands of the internet and contributes to the larger picture of a stronger, better, faster and more reliable internet as a whole.

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So what do you do? Start talking with your development team about putting a plan in place to make sure that your website is migrated by the deadline of November 2021. Determine the best path, whether migrating now to Drupal 8 to beat the rush or waiting for Drupal 9 to make the move. According to our technical lead, Bryan Cordrey, the migration from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 should be pretty easy so that’s good news.

If you are already in a Drupal support and maintenance plan with Inclind, rest assured we are working on a strategy for migrating our current Drupal 7 clients. If you have a Drupal 7 website and are in need of Drupal support partner to help you with upgrading your platform, contact us today."