Drupal takes an impressive share of the top sites worldwide.

It's used on 3.1% of the top million and 7.5% of the top 1,000 (October 2022) sites. Therefore, many businesses are considering what to do when, on the 1st of November 2023, Drupal 7 reaches its end of life. With the ever-growing concerns for online security, this means that come November 2023, support and critical security updates will no longer be provided. 

Currently, 53% of all Drupal websites are using Drupal 7. Unipro has a long history with Drupal, delivering over 40 projects across various industries from Pharmaceutical and healthcare to utilities and local government and retail, so our teams have been contemplating this since the date was announced.

Drupal 7’s end-of-life leaves many businesses facing the same question.

• do they upgrade to Drupal 9,
• or do they take the opportunity to invest in an alternative solution? The answer won't be the same for every business.

With over half of the installed base facing the same dilemma, this blog looks to help you understand what options are available to you and how to make the best decision for your business.

Option 1: Upgrade to Drupal 9

The upgrade to Drupal 9 offers a number of benefits for your organization. It will allow you to continue to innovate with the latest features and deliver great functionality to your users.

Drupal 9 also offers a significant improvement in performance and security. Being built from the ground up to be modern, it uses core APIs that are easily pluggable, reducing time spent on implementations and integrations. 

What do you get from the upgrade?

Enhanced security
Being an open-source project, Drupal benefits from scrutiny, maintenance and input from developers around the globe in addition to their own dedicated team of security experts collaborating consistently to address and release security fixes. 

Drupal’s security ensures:

• User Access Control

• Database Encryption

• Information sharing via security reports

• Auto-update and core validation work in partnership with GitHub

• Prevention of malicious data entry

• Mitigation of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks

• Patching of issues before they’re exploited

Drupal is a secure, flexible and powerful platform that powers over 1 million websites. It’s great for large enterprises in need of multi-channel sites with custom content, but it’s also ideal for smaller businesses that want to grow their site with ease.

Drupal has built-in performance features that perform well under the pressure of load-balancing, supercharged databases and advanced caching. This scalability means Drupal delivers consistently across platforms — addressing the growing need for mobile to render quickly and effectively.

Drupal's automated language translation is a powerful tool if you want to reach different markets or audiences with your content. Drupal allows you to instantly and seamlessly translate your messages and information into any language. You can ensure that content and documentation are authored, updated, and delivered continually in any market worldwide.

• Reach a wider audience

• Unrivalled translation workflows

• SEO Boost

• Increased conversions, according to CSA Research, users prefer to make purchases while browsing in their native language.

Option 2: Alternative solutions to Drupal

Understanding your business and where improvement can be realised is not always accessible from the inside as you are living and breathing the company's processes and procedures on a day-to-day basis, which is why it pays to step back and trust an expert pair of fresh eyes (with no baggage).

The Unipro team can help analyse your business requirements and access your existing solutions, technology and platforms to provide accurate insight into your business. We adopt the same processes and activities as we would when discovering before starting a client project.

Based on over 20 years of experience, our digital consultants take clients on a journey of strategic Service Design, where businesses create sustainable solutions and optimal experiences for customers within their unique business contexts.

What do you get from Unipro’s service design?

• Clarity of vision

• Align your team in understanding 

• User-centric service design 

• Plot exact workflows 

• Understand the depth of technical integration 

• Expose dependencies

• Identify challenges 

• Solve problems  

• Avoid pitfalls 

• Rapid Strategic Design and prototype development 

• Accelerate delivery for faster time to value

• Technically and commercially, fulfil your company’s vision. 

What are the risks of inaction?

It’s important to state that your Drupal 7 site will continue to function after the 1st of November 2023; however, there are other impacts of not making the leap, which will not be acceptable for mission-critical implementations. 

• There will be no more community support.

• Feature updates and bug fixes will no longer be available. 

• The community-based Drupal Security Team will stop monitoring Drupal 7, increasing security concerns. 

• Third-party integrations and plug-ins will eventually stop working.

• Maintaining functionality will require elevated levels of maintenance and resource, increasing costs and stunting financial growth.

• The longer you wait to upgrade, the further your organisation will fall behind.