Why migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8

Why don’t wait for Drupal 9 and migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8

So why it’s worth migration to Drupal 8?

The Drupal 6 core

Drupal 6 Core is no longer supported by the Drupal Security Team, only by 2 vendors. Now one of those vendors promises that this LTS (Long-Term Support) will last up to 2022.

Drupal 6 will live for a while, that’s true. But the overall update process in Drupal 6 is much harder in comparison to the supported versions: the vendors and website owners have to manually patch the modules and the core if they pursue security.

The PHP versions compatible with Drupal

There’s the possibility that some Drupal 6 websites run on PHP 5.x that is no longer supported since January 1, 2019. Consequently, no more security fixes for PHP 5.x.

In spite of the fact that Drupal 6 LTS vendors support PHP 7.1+, it’s still red tape to run Drupal 6 with these PHP versions. 

Also, a number of Drupal 6 contributed modules working with PHP 7.1+ is strictly limited.

Drupal 6 security

Sometimes Drupal 6 gets the security updates with a delay. In many cases, it happens due to the backport issue. In a nutshell, when one detects a problem with supported versions of Drupal Core (Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 at the moment) or its modules, a solution usually requires the backport to Drupal 6.

But to tell the truth, it’s not only that all Drupal 6 fixes should be backported. Sometimes it’s just Drupal 6 only problem.

Drupal 6 limited functionality

We can recall just few cases when Drupal 6 got bug fixes; mainly the support is about security fixes.

Also, no new features are expected for the Drupal 6 core and modules.

Drupal 8 is the feature-rich version

It’s no secret that Drupal changes from version to version. Drupal 8 offers things that Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 don’t have: RESTful Web Services and JSON API out-of-the-box allow implementing the Decoupled approach, it’s mobile-friendly out-of-the-box and has better accessibility, there’s a better solution for multilingual websites.

Due to the new release cycle, new featured are added to the Drupal core much faster than ever before.

For those who love and dig tech things: there are new features like the WYSIWYG editor, new field types, and besides, Drupal 8 has a better technical stack. Symfony components, Twig, OOP, Composer. 

Drupal 6 is not about convenient workflow anymore

Drupal developers get worried about working with unsupported versions. It’s both a waste of time and money since there is a lot of overheads connected with Drupal 6 development. We mentioned some of them above.

Drupal 6 support is not cheap

One more reason why we consider the Drupal 6 upgrade to 8 - money matters.

The annual support of a Drupal 6 website is somewhat costly (that’s relevant for rather big business websites like corporate websites with lots of lead-catching features, e-commerce and enterprise ones). Check how much you spend on your Drupal 6 site: probably you’re spending too much on it.

If you’re interested, we did some math here: check Why migrate your website to Drupal page.

For all the other questions - fill out our contact form and we will revert to you within a business day.