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20 Reasons to Start Your Drupal 7 to 9 Migration NOW!

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Does 13 months feel like a comfortable cushion between now and the Nov. 28, 2022 Drupal 7 end of life? It’s not.
The time to get serious about your Drupal 9 migration is now. There are countless reasons why. 
Here are our top 20. 

  1. Even though Drupal 7 is technically still being supported, the Drupal community’s focus is on Drupal 9 and 10. With no particular inspiration among developers to support Drupal 7, websites that use Drupal 7 contributed modules will be increasingly prone to instability issues.  
  2. With as many structural difference as there are between Drupal 7 and Drupal 9, building in as much time as possible is an essential strategy for mitigating against unwelcome surprises that can occur during a Drupal 9 migration.
  3. Despite the Drupal 9 release date of more than a year and a half ago (June 2020), more than a half million websites around the world are still on Drupal 7. As such, there is every reason to expect that the best Drupal design and development agencies will become overwhelmed with work as the November 2022 Drupal 7 end-of-life date nears. Delaying a migration to Drupal 9 might mean settling for sub-par Drupal talent and expertise, and allowing your site to be rushed through an extremely packed queue.
  4. Drupal migration is a prime opportunity to think strategically about your site and how the architecture, design, and user experience can more effectively drive current objectives and branding. Starting the Drupal 9 migration process as soon as possible will help in optimizing every aspect of the opportunity.
  5. Every day that migration to Drupal 9 is delayed translates into another day in which your organization is not benefitting from a far superior CMS with a depth and breadth of transformative new Drupal 9 features and functionality.
  6. Drupal 9 offers game-changing content editing capabilities that far exceed what was possible in Drupal 7. The built-in visual layout builder allows for the ability to easily edit and switch up layouts, reuse blocks, and customize all parts of the page.
  7. Building upon the content editor enhancements of Drupal 8, the Drupal 9 admin dashboard features CKEditor’s WYSIWYG rich text editing capabilities, along with a configurable toolbar, quick edit feature, Layout Builder, and the modern Claro admin theme.
  8. Development and staging environment support is built into Drupal 9’s integrated configuration management system.
  9. A media library comes out of the box, allowing for the easy access to and reuse of all images and media.
  10. Establish as the leading CMS for multilingual functionality, Drupal translation interfaces for more than 100 languages allow for full multilingual support in all content and configuration. Recent enhancements include the attachment of language fields to language-aware entity objects from which language is "inherited," vs. previous public API exposure. 
  11. Better keyboard navigation is among the built-in ADA web accessibility features for users with disabilities.
  12. Olivero, Drupal 9’s new front-end theme has been described as an accessibility masterpiece.
  13. Structured data features build upon Drupal’s framework for enhanced SEO. 
  14. A  “mobile first” approach translates into a huge SEO advantage driven by Google’s transition to mobile-first indexing.  
  15. The mobile-first UI also allows for the ability to easily make updates or revisions to the site from a mobile device. 
  16. Built-in BigPipe supports faster initial page loads, along with better performance and scalability.
  17. Built-in JSON:API support allows for progressively and fully decoupled applications.
  18. The updated code base leverages the latest version of PHP, for increasingly tighter security.  
  19. Use of the most current third-party libraries and components, such as Symfony and Twig, enhance performance. 
  20. Integration with JavaScript frameworks and architecture enhancements result in greater speed. 

The Drupal organization has referred to migration from Drupal 7 as the last big migration. No further platform upheavals are expected. Future upgrades will be evolutionary, within a continuous innovation cycle that delivers enhanced features twice a year. 
Migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 is a process that hundreds of thousands of site owners worldwide have opted to not yet engage with. Despite the procrastination that is running deep and wide, the fact is, when a devoted Drupal design and development partner is guiding the migration with unsurpassed expertise and skill, the process transforms from a “have to” to a “get to.”
The Drupal 7 end of life clock is ticking. Looking for a partner who can get you where you need to be with far greater value than you could have expected? That’s what we do here at Promet Source.

Questions or concerns about how or where to start? Let’s talk.
 

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