Migrate to Drupal 11 without drama or SEO loss
A successful Drupal migration is an engineering project: a lucid audit, a precise plan, methodical delivery — and a bulletproof redirect map. I have been running Drupal migrations since version 6; here is how I work.
Where does your Drupal version stand?
These dates are not negotiable — they are set by the Drupal community.
Drupal 7
End of life since January 2025
No more official security fixes. Every passing month raises both the risk and the migration cost.
Drupal 9
End of life since November 2023
Frozen ecosystem, growing incompatibilities with recent PHP versions and hosting stacks.
Drupal 10
End of support: December 2026
The move to Drupal 11 is far simpler than a D7 migration — provided you do not wait until the last quarter.
The four phases of a clean migration
- 01
Audit the existing site
Inventory of modules (contrib and custom), theme, content and friction points. You get an honest assessment and a per-scenario estimate.
- 02
Migration plan
What migrates automatically, what gets rewritten, what gets dropped. A realistic timeline, with risks identified before starting — not during.
- 03
Delivery
Content and feature migration, custom module rewrites, acceptance testing with your teams. Your current site stays in production until cut-over.
- 04
Cut-over without SEO loss
Exhaustive 301 redirect map, preserved URLs and metadata, sitemap, post-launch Search Console monitoring. Your rankings do not leave with the old site.
The differentiator: I treat every migration as an SEO project too. URL and ranking inventory before migration, page-to-page mapping, 301 redirects, structured data verification, and Search Console monitoring after cut-over. That is exactly where most migrations destroy value.