Drupal 7's official end of life has now passed, and the vendor-extended support window most sites relied on afterward is winding down too. If you're still running Drupal 7, this is the practical guide we walk clients through, covering what actually breaks, how to choose a path forward, and a realistic timeline for migrating off it.
What actually breaks after EOL
Nothing breaks the day support ends — your site keeps running exactly as it did the day before. What changes is risk exposure. The Drupal Security Team stops issuing coordinated security advisories for core and contrib modules, so newly discovered vulnerabilities go unpatched indefinitely unless you're paying for extended support. PHP itself is the more immediate practical issue: Drupal 7 was built for PHP 5.x/7.x era conventions, and hosting providers are steadily dropping support for older PHP versions, which eventually forces you onto a version Drupal 7 was never tested against. We've seen client sites break outright after a routine PHP upgrade from their host, with fatal errors in contrib modules that were never updated for newer PHP syntax.
Drupal 11 vs WordPress vs staying put
We walk every Drupal 7 client through three real options:
Migrate to Drupal 11. Makes sense if you have complex content modelling (multiple content types with dozens of fields, taxonomy structures, multilingual content) that Drupal's entity system handles well. Drupal 11 dropped a meaningful amount of legacy code compared to Drupal 9/10 and requires PHP 8.3+, so your hosting stack needs an upgrade regardless.
Migrate to WordPress. Makes sense for sites that are primarily content/brochure-ware without heavy custom entity relationships. WordPress migrations from Drupal 7 are usually faster and cheaper because the content model is simpler, but you lose Drupal's more granular permissions and taxonomy flexibility.
Pay for extended Drupal 7 security support. A holding pattern, not a solution. Vendors like Platform.sh or D7 extended-support providers will patch critical vulnerabilities for a fee, buying you 12–24 months. We only recommend this when a migration genuinely can't be scoped and budgeted within the next year — it should have an expiry date attached to it, not be treated as a permanent fix.
Auditing 400 contrib modules
The hardest part of any Drupal 7 migration isn't the core upgrade, it's the contrib module inventory. A typical mid-size Drupal 7 site we inherit has 150–400 contrib modules installed, many undocumented and installed by a developer who's no longer with the company. Our audit process:
- Export the full module list with
drush pm-list --status=enabled - Cross-reference each module against drupal.org to check for a maintained Drupal 10/11 port
- Flag modules with no D9+ equivalent — these need custom replacement or feature removal
- Identify modules that are actually unused (enabled but no active configuration) — these typically account for 20–30% of the list and can simply be dropped
Views, Panels, and CTools usually have direct upgrade paths. Custom-coded modules built for a single client feature almost always need a full rewrite, since Drupal's plugin and dependency-injection architecture changed substantially between 7 and 9+.
A realistic 12-week migration timeline
For a mid-size site (30–80 content types and views, no e-commerce):
- Weeks 1–2: Module and content audit, migration plan, hosting environment setup
- Weeks 3–5: Core Drupal 11 build, content type and field migration via the core Migrate API
- Weeks 6–8: Custom module rebuilds, theme rebuild (Drupal 7 themes are not portable and need a full front-end rebuild against Drupal 11's Twig templating)
- Weeks 9–10: Content migration execution and QA, including URL alias mapping and 301 redirects
- Weeks 11–12: Staging review, accessibility pass to WCAG 2.2 AA, launch, and two weeks of post-launch monitoring
Budget for this type of migration typically runs $25,000–$60,000 CAD depending on content volume and how much custom functionality needs rebuilding. E-commerce or membership functionality on top of that adds real cost — that's a separate scoping conversation.
If you're not sure which of the three paths fits your site, send us your current module list and we'll give you a straight answer on scope and cost within a few days.
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Surrey, BC
A full-service digital agency working in WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, Webflow, React, and React Native. We partner with universities, governments, and growing brands to ship sites and products that hold up after launch.
