Drupal 7 Migration in 2026: Upgrade to Drupal 11 or Move Off Drupal?

Drupal 7 lost community security updates on January 5, 2025. You have three exits: rebuild on Drupal 11, move to another platform, or buy extended support as a bridge.

Dates that shape the decision

• Drupal 10 reaches end of life on December 9, 2026, so migrating to it now makes little sense.
• Drupal 11 keeps the core migration modules, while Drupal 12 removes them.

Stay on Drupal or move

• Stay for thousands of nodes, role-based editing, multi-site, multilingual or gated content.
• Move for a few hundred marketing pages, one or two editors, or product logic that has outgrown a CMS.
• A hybrid keeps Drupal for content and new services for product logic.

What migrates and what is rebuilt

• Migrates: content types, fields, nodes, users, taxonomy, files, menus, aliases and redirects.
• Rebuilt: theme, custom modules, most Views and layouts.
• Converted: Field Collection to Paragraphs, and rich text to CKEditor 5.

How to run the migration

• Inventory the site and clean the content model.
• Build on a current PHP version.
• Run repeatable migrations against a live copy.
• Map every URL, freeze content, migrate the delta and switch DNS.
• Monitor 404s, search coverage and forms.

Common mistakes

• Treating extended support as the plan.
• Skipping the redirect map.
• Porting unused features.
• Attempting one big migration.