Legacy or unsupported
Moving your website off Drupal
Drupal is genuinely powerful software, and for large institutions with in-house developers it remains a reasonable choice. For a small business with a Drupal 7 site built a decade ago by a contractor who has moved on, it has become an expensive way to run a brochure website.
Where you actually stand
The hard date first: Drupal 7 security support ended on 5 January 2025, and Drupal.org described that as the final extension. Drupal 8 ended in November 2021. If your site is on either, it is outside community support.
Drupal.org has been direct about the consequences, warning that unsupported Drupal 7 sites may fall out of compliance with FedRAMP, PCI, HIPAA and SOC 2. If you handle payments or health information, that is not an abstract concern.
To be fair: paid extended security support is available from certified vendors including HeroDevs and Tag1 Consulting, so a Drupal 7 site is not literally unpatchable. But you are now paying a specialist vendor to keep a decade-old CMS alive, which is worth weighing against the cost of not needing to.
Open source, self-hosted, and entirely yours
Drupal is free software and your site is yours. There is no vendor lock-in and no licence to escape.
What you are escaping is cost and scarcity. Drupal developers are expensive and thin on the ground for small-business work, major-version migrations are notoriously involved, and the hosting requirements are heavier than a static-first Next.js site needs. A rebuild keeps the ownership and drops the overhead.
What this costs you day to day
Drupal 7 is outside community security support
Support ended 5 January 2025. Paid extended support exists commercially, but no free security updates are coming.
Compliance exposure
Drupal.org has warned that unsupported Drupal 7 sites may fall out of compliance with FedRAMP, PCI, HIPAA and SOC 2. Relevant if you take payments or handle patient data.
Major-version migration is a project, not an update
Moving Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 or 11 is a rebuild in all but name — content model, theme and every contributed module. Cost it properly before assuming it is the cheaper path.
Specialist developers, specialist rates
Drupal expertise is real expertise and priced accordingly. For a site that is mostly pages and a contact form, that is a lot of overhead.
Heavier hosting than the site needs
Drupal wants PHP, a database and meaningful server resources. A statically-generated Next.js site delivers the same pages from a CDN edge.
How the rebuild works
Six steps, and your involvement is deliberately minimal. We handle the technical side, bring you recommendations, and come to you when a decision or an approval is genuinely needed. You review the finished site before it goes live.
- 1
We audit your current website
We review your existing site — pages, content, SEO, functionality and structure. We identify what should be improved, updated or dropped, rather than copying over things that were never working.
- 2
We rebuild the site in Next.js
Your branding and content carry over, but the site is rebuilt from the ground up in Next.js. That removes the database and plugin dependencies behind most performance, security and maintenance problems.
For Drupal specifically: We read nodes, taxonomy and media directly from the Drupal database, so complex content models with many content types come across intact. Where Drupal’s structure was doing real work — related content, faceted listings — we rebuild that as structured data rather than flattening it into pages.
- 3
We improve it while we rebuild it
This is the part people underestimate. We are not handing you a newer version of the same website. We look for real gains in navigation, page layout, calls to action, mobile experience, content and SEO.
- 4
We preserve your SEO
Existing URLs, page titles, metadata and redirects are all accounted for in the transition. The goal is to move platforms without giving up the search visibility you have already built.
- 5
We test everything before it goes live
Desktop and mobile, every form, every piece of functionality, all content reviewed — checked and working before we touch anything in production.
- 6
We launch
Once you approve it, we move the new site into production. From your side the transition should be uneventful, and your visitors should never see an interruption.
What comes with you
- All nodes and content types, read from the database
- Taxonomy and category structures
- Media and file attachments
- Every URL and path alias, preserved or redirected
- Metadata and structured data
- Forms and third-party integrations
You own what we build. In writing.
Every rebuild is delivered with a Certificate of Ownership and IP Assignment: a signed document assigning you the copyright in the site code and the content we produce for you, and recording the transfer of the repository, the domain and the hosting account into your name. You are not licensing your website from us. If you ever leave, you take the whole thing with you — the code, the content, the domain, the repository and the deployment history.
- Full copyright assignment in the site code and the content we write for you.
- The Git repository transferred to an account you control, with its full history.
- The domain in your name, at a registrar of your choosing.
- Hosting in your own Vercel account if you want it there — we can manage it, but ownership sits with you.
- No proprietary page builder, no template licence, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying us.
Questions people ask about leaving Drupal
- When exactly did Drupal 7 reach end of life?
- 5 January 2025. Drupal.org announced it as the final extension of Drupal 7 end of life. Drupal 8 reached end of life in November 2021.
- Can I still get security patches for Drupal 7?
- Commercially, yes. Certified vendors including HeroDevs and Tag1 Consulting sell extended security support under Drupal’s Extended Security Support Provider Program. What has ended is free community security support. Whether paying a vendor to extend a 2011-era CMS is the right spend is the question worth asking.
- Should I migrate to Drupal 11 instead?
- If you have in-house Drupal capability and genuinely complex editorial workflows, quite possibly. For a small business running a marketing site, a Drupal 7 to 11 migration is a rebuild that leaves you with the same hosting costs and the same specialist dependency. Get both quotes.
- My Drupal site has a complicated content structure. Can you handle it?
- Yes. Complex content models are the reason people chose Drupal, and we model them properly rather than flattening everything into static pages. We read directly from the database, so nothing is retyped.
Sources
Every claim made about Drupal on this page comes from Drupal’s own published documentation. Read them yourself. We would rather you did.
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Start by finding out where you actually are
The free scan tells you what your site is built on, what is slowing it down, what search engines and AI answer engines can currently read, and roughly what a rebuild would cost.
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