With 68% of enterprises moving to new CMS platforms in 2024 and 99% seeing real improvements, the question isn’t if you should upgrade but when. With Drupal 7 ending on January 5, 2025 and Drupal CMS 2.0 arriving later in 2025 with features like Experience Builder and AI-powered workflows, timing matters. This guide simplifies the migration journey and shows how to turn a complex process into a real competitive advantage with data-backed insights and practical strategies.
The Migration Reality: Why Now Matters More Than Ever
Platform migration often feels like a chore, but the data shows it can be a real growth driver. With digital transformation spending headed toward $3.4 trillion by 2026, the platforms enterprises choose now shape their long-term advantage.
A great example is the University of West London. After moving to Drupal, they saw 81% fewer drop-offs, 139% more international inquiries, and 50% more new users. That result came from choosing a platform built for enterprise needs.
The urgency is real. Drupal 7 still powers about 134,000 sites, and support ends on January 5, 2025. After that, organizations face increasing security risks.
The upside is that enterprises migrating with a clear strategy are succeeding. Seventy-nine percent stay on schedule, and 99% see measurable improvements. Migration isn’t just upkeep; it’s a chance to strengthen digital performance.
Understanding Your Path: Drupal 7 EOL and Strategic Options
When Drupal 7 support ends in January 2025, teams either upgrade on their terms or scramble later. Waiting only makes migration harder.
If you’re still on Drupal 7, you have three choices:
1. Move to Drupal 10+
The best long-term option. You get modern features, better security, and lower costs. Many enterprises report 60–80% savings compared to proprietary CMSs, with brands like Johnson & Johnson and Bentley University cutting costs by more than half.
2. Switch platforms
Some smaller or simpler sites move to WordPress for ease of use. But in the top 10,000 websites, Drupal still holds 12.8% because it handles scale, complexity, permissions, and compliance better than most systems.
3. Use Never Ending Support (NES)
This delays migration but doesn’t solve the real problem. Security patches get limited, custom work gets harder, and integrations become messy. It’s a stopgap, not a strategy.
For most enterprises, the smart move is clear: upgrade to Drupal 10 or choose a new platform. Most are choosing to upgrade.
Drupal CMS 2.0: The Enterprise Game-Changer
October 2025 is a big deal for Drupal. That’s when Drupal CMS 2.0 launches, and it’s not a small update. It completely repositions Drupal and changes how teams should think about migration timing.
Drupal CMS 2.0 brings four major upgrades:
1. Experience Builder (XB)
A visual drag-and-drop page builder that finally lets content teams build pages without developers. It’s easy for marketers but still uses Drupal’s strong permissions, workflows, and governance behind the scenes.
Agencies testing it are already seeing faster delivery and fewer routine dev tasks, which means post-migration teams can run leaner.
2. AI Framework
AI becomes part of the core, not a plugin. It supports major AI models, auto-generates content, improves SEO, creates alt text, personalizes experiences, and can even help generate layouts.
For large organizations with huge content libraries, this saves massive time and boosts accessibility and consistency.
3. Content Hubs
Perfect for enterprises running many websites or regional sites. You can manage content centrally and reuse it everywhere, while local teams still customize their own versions. No more 50 sites with 50 workflows.
4. Advanced Workflow & Governance
Built-in multi-level approvals, dashboards, CRM/marketing integrations, and full audit trails. For regulated industries, this is essential—and now it’s native.
Drupal CMS 2.0 isn’t just an update. It reshapes how enterprises plan migrations and operate after launch.
Migration Planning: De-risking the Journey
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: 80% of data migration projects run over time or budget. But here’s the encouraging truth: organizations that follow proven planning frameworks cut their failure rate dramatically. The difference between a smooth migration and a catastrophic one often comes down to preparation, not luck.
Phase 1: Assessment and Discovery (Weeks 1–4)
Before you can move forward, you need a clear picture of where you stand. This phase answers fundamental questions:
Audit Your Current State
Document every content type, custom module, integration, and workflow currently on your Drupal 7 site. How many pages? What’s your page hierarchy? How many user roles and permissions levels? What third-party systems integrate with your current site (marketing automation, CRM, analytics, payment processing, etc.)?
This sounds tedious, but it’s where 50% of migration problems originate. Teams underestimate their own complexity and then face surprises during data migration. Specifically, around 50% of migrations require significant adjustments to user roles and permissions, and nearly 40% encounter theme and layout compatibility challenges. You can only plan for what you understand.
Performance and Security Baseline
Run speed tests and security audits on your current site. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Drupal’s Security Review module give you concrete baseline metrics. This matters because migration ROI includes performance improvements—when you improve from 4-second load times to 2-second load times, that’s not a technical achievement; that’s a business outcome affecting bounce rates and conversion.
Integration Inventory
Map every system your website talks to. Marketing platforms, CRM systems, email services, payment processors, data warehouses—all of it. Some integrations may simplify in the new environment; others may require rebuilding. Legacy system compatibility issues affect 67% of enterprise migrations, so understanding your integration landscape upfront prevents surprises downstream.
Phase 2: Strategy and Planning (Weeks 4–8)
Once you understand what you’re migrating, plan how you’re migrating.
Define Your Migration Approach
You have three primary strategies:
- Big Bang Migration – Move everything at once during a scheduled maintenance window. Fast, but risky. If something breaks, everything is down.
- Phased Migration – Move content type by type, or site section by section, while the old platform remains operational. Slower, but dramatically lower risk. You can validate each phase before proceeding.
- Parallel Operations – Run old and new platforms simultaneously for a period, syncing critical data until you’re confident enough to flip the switch. Most complex, but provides a genuine safety net.
For most enterprises, phased or parallel migration offers the best protection against extended outages. Migration-related downtime costs businesses an average of $5,600 per minute, and that’s the mild version. A 24-hour outage on a critical website isn’t a technical inconvenience; it’s a brand impact and revenue hit.
Build Your Team and Timeline
This is where many organizations fail. They underestimate resource requirements. Data migration failure rates drop by 73% with proper planning, which includes adequate resourcing, not just scheduling. Your team typically includes:
- A project manager coordinating workstreams
- Content strategists defining what gets migrated and how
- Drupal developers handling technical architecture and custom code
- Content migration specialists (often overlooked) who validate that content maps correctly
- QA testers working through acceptance criteria
- DevOps/infrastructure specialists managing environments and performance
Realistic timeline for a mid-sized enterprise migration: 3–6 months for proper planning, execution, and stabilization. Rushed migrations targeting 6-week timelines typically result in corners cut, testing skipped, and post-launch issues discovered by end users rather than your team.
Phase 3: Technical Preparation (Weeks 6–10)
While planning continues, technical work begins.
Infrastructure Setup
Drupal 10/CMS 2.0 requires PHP 8.1 or higher, which is important if you’re coming from older Drupal 7 environments sometimes running on PHP 5.6 or 7.0. Hosting infrastructure may need upgrading. Database performance becomes critical at scale—Drupal 10’s advanced caching and optimization features only work well if your underlying infrastructure is properly tuned.
For cloud-based deployments, organizations often see immediate ROI. Drupal on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure with proper CDN configuration can reduce infrastructure costs by 53%, with enterprise implementations achieving 99.99% uptime.
Development Environment Setup
Establish a complete local development environment. DDEV has become the standard with 93% recommendation rates among Drupal developers, eliminating frustration from mismatched local/production environments. Everyone on your team works in identical environments, reducing “works on my machine” problems.
Data Mapping and Transformation
Define exactly how data transforms from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. This includes:
- Content type mapping – How do Drupal 7 content types transform into Drupal 10 structures?
- Field transformations – How do field values convert? (This is often more complex than it sounds—Drupal 7 and 10 handle many field types differently)
- Taxonomy and hierarchies – How do Drupal 7 taxonomy terms migrate while preserving hierarchies?
- User data and roles – How do user records and role mappings convert? Data mapping errors result in significant data loss or corruption, affecting 84% of migrations if not properly managed.
Tools like Acquia Migrate, Migrate Plus, and Migrate Tools automate much of this, but they still require careful configuration. This is not the place to cut corners or assume things will “just work.”
Real-World ROI: What Success Actually Looks Like
Numbers matter when you’re asking executives to fund a migration. Here’s what actually happens when enterprises get it right:
Performance Improvements
- 79% of Drupal migrations resulted in mostly or entirely resolved pain points, with 53% describing their new CMS as easy or very easy to adopt.
- 99% of organizations report improvements after switching to modern Drupal implementations.
- Real implementations show 5x faster dashboard performance and 80% higher user satisfaction scores.
Cost Metrics
- Enterprise Drupal migrations typically cost between $15,000 and $85,000 for straightforward implementations, with complex deployments potentially exceeding $100,000. This sounds significant until you compare:
- Bentley University saved 75% compared to their previous CMS investment (they were on an expensive proprietary system)
- Johnson & Johnson reduced website build costs by 59%
- 60–80% lower TCO over three years compared to proprietary CMS solutions
- One U.S. retailer scaled from 50,000 to 1.5 million monthly visitors while maintaining 99.99% uptime and full PCI compliance on Drupal’s scalable architecture
Revenue and Engagement Impact
- The University of West London saw 81% fewer drop-offs, 139% more international inquiries, and 50% more new users post-migration
- 72% fewer unauthorized access attempts after adopting Drupal’s role-based access control (RBAC)
- Faster time-to-market – enterprises cite Drupal’s flexibility helping them reach market faster, which in today’s landscape means weeks or months of competitive advantage
Digital Transformation Context
Migrations don’t exist in isolation. Organizations pursuing migrations are simultaneously pursuing broader digital transformation. 61% of executives consider digital transformation a top business priority, and only 35% of companies achieve all their transformation goals. The organizations that succeed typically bundle platform investments with process improvements, team enablement, and strategic capability building.
In this context, migration costs become part of a larger digital transformation budget. When your organization is investing $1.8 billion annually in digital initiatives (average for enterprises with $13.4 billion revenue), a $50,000 migration investment represents less than 3% of digital spending while unlocking capabilities that multiply the value of your entire digital portfolio.
Turn Drupal into a complete digital experience platform
Pooja Upadhyay
Director Of People Operations & Client Relations
Key Metrics That Drive Migration Success
Success isn’t a feeling; it’s measurable. Here’s what to track:
| Metric | Target | Why It Matters |
| On-time delivery | 79% baseline, achievable with planning | Demonstrates execution capability and trust with stakeholders |
| Data integrity | 100% validation | Even 0.1% data loss on a million-page site means 1,000 broken pages |
| Performance improvement | 25%+ improvement in Core Web Vitals | Directly impacts search rankings and user experience |
| Adoption rate | 53%+ describe system as easy/very easy | Indicates team readiness and training effectiveness |
| Post-launch issues | <5% of pages requiring fixes | Shows testing rigor and preparation quality |
| Security improvements | 72% reduction in unauthorized access attempts | Measures governance and access control effectiveness |
| Cost per migrated page | $30-$150 depending on complexity | Benchmarks your efficiency for future migrations |
| Time to value | ROI within 12 months | Determines if this was a strategic investment or cost center |
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Learning from others’ mistakes costs nothing; learning from your own costs significantly more.
Pitfall 1: Underestimating Scope
The Problem: Teams assume they’ll migrate exactly what they have. “This site has 5,000 pages, so migration should be straightforward.” Then they discover 500 custom modules, 50 content types with complex relationships, and integrations with seven different systems. Suddenly, that “straightforward” migration is a six-month project.
The Solution: Build a 20% contingency into your timeline estimates. Add 30% buffer to your resource plan. Realistic planning with adequate contingency dramatically reduces failure rates. This isn’t pessimism; it’s experience talking. Complex environments have edge cases. Acknowledge them upfront.
Pitfall 2: Inadequate Testing
The Problem: Your development environment tests work perfectly. Launch day arrives. Production has different performance characteristics, different data volumes, different concurrent user patterns. Things break in ways your testing never surfaced.
The Solution: Test with production-realistic data volumes. Test with production-realistic concurrent load. Run multiple migration rehearsals in increasingly realistic environments. Every rehearsal reveals issues you’ll face in production, making actual migration execution of a proven playbook rather than discovery. Organizations that conduct rigorous test migrations cut their failure rates dramatically.
Pitfall 3: Skipping User Roles and Permissions Review
The Problem: You migrate content perfectly, but user access is broken. Content editors can’t access content they should. Administrators can’t manage sections they’re responsible for. You’ve created a functional site with broken workflows.
The Solution: Before migration, audit every user role and permission. Document what each role should access in the new system. Test role transitions for a sample of real users. Around 50% of migrations require significant adjustments to user roles and permissions—plan for this rather than treating it as a surprise.
Pitfall 4: Inadequate Documentation
The Problem: The migration succeeds. Your team exhausts themselves in the final push. Then they leave for vacation. A critical issue emerges while they’re gone. The new team has no documentation of custom code, data transformations, or integration logic. They’re essentially starting from scratch.
The Solution: Document as you go. Record decisions, rationale, custom code logic, and integration configurations. This isn’t administrative overhead; it’s protecting your investment post-launch when the real work begins.
Pitfall 5: Treating Migration as a One-Time Event
The Problem: Organizations finish migrations and consider themselves done. They don’t budget for ongoing optimization, security updates, or team training. Six months later, they’re running unpatched code with suboptimal configurations.
The Solution: Plan for post-launch phases:
- Weeks 1–4 post-launch: Stabilization, bug fixes, performance tuning
- Months 2–3: Optimization based on real-world usage patterns
- Months 3–12: Training, process refinement, capability building
- Year 2+: Ongoing maintenance, security updates, feature expansion
Migration success is measured at 12 months, not at launch. Organizations that invest in post-launch optimization see their ROI accelerate as their teams master the new platform.
Charting Your Course Forward
For modern leaders evaluating re-platforming decisions, the strategic clarity is becoming sharper. Drupal 7 reaches end-of-life on January 5, 2025, not as a crisis but as an opportunity. Organizations staying on unsupported platforms face growing security and integration challenges. Organizations migrating strategically are using it as a moment to reassess their digital strategy, modernize their infrastructure, and gain competitive advantages through better performance, security, and user experience.
The data is clear: 99% of organizations report improvements after switching to modern Drupal implementations. 79% meet their migration timelines with proper planning. Real ROI arrives within 12 months, often sooner. This isn’t theoretical—it’s what’s happening across governments, enterprises, universities, and media organizations in 2024 and 2025.
Drupal CMS 2.0 arriving in October 2025 adds another dimension. Experience Builder, AI-powered workflows, Content Hubs, and advanced governance features represent a genuine leap forward from the last major Drupal release. Organizations migrating now can plan for these capabilities, either implementing them immediately or having a clear upgrade path within months.
The real question isn’t whether to migrate—it’s when and with whom. The best time to start planning was six months ago. The second-best time is today. Partners like AddWeb Solution, with deep expertise in enterprise migrations, security-first implementations, and post-launch optimization, bridge the gap between strategic vision and execution reality. They’ve managed hundreds of migrations, encountered nearly every edge case, and built methodologies that consistently deliver the improvements enterprises expect.
Your platform choice compounds over years. It determines what’s possible tomorrow. For enterprises serious about digital transformation, competitive positioning, and sustainable growth, Drupal CMS 2.0 represents a compelling platform foundation. Start the conversation now. Your 2025 digital landscape may very well depend on the decisions you make in the final weeks of 2024.
Quick Facts & Stats Box
📊 Key Takeaways:
- 1.68 million websites run on Drupal, including Tesla, NBC, Pfizer, Harvard, and 150+ governments worldwide
- 56% of global government websites use Drupal, making it the top choice for public sector digital services
- 99% of organizations report improvements after switching to modern Drupal implementations
- 68% of enterprises migrated to new CMS platforms in 2024, with Drupal leading migration adoption
- 79% of users who migrated found their pain points mostly or entirely resolved
- December 7 is Drupal 7 EOL – after this date, no more security updates or support
- October 2025 launches Drupal CMS 2.0 with Experience Builder, AI Framework, and Content Hubs
Industry Leadership Perspective
“Drupal’s enterprise capabilities aren’t just about content management—they’re about enabling organizations to scale digital experiences securely and sustainably. The migration isn’t disruptive if you plan strategically. It’s transformative.” — Digital Transformation Leadership Report, 2025
“We migrated from an older platform expecting it would be complex. Instead, it became our foundation for digital innovation. The new capabilities have changed how we think about content strategy and audience engagement.” — University Digital Officer
Ready to Navigate Your Migration?
Platform migrations aren’t one-size-fits-all. Your organizational context, content complexity, team capability, and business objectives all shape the right approach. AddWeb Solution specializes in helping enterprises navigate re-platforming journeys with minimal risk and maximum impact. From strategic assessment through post-launch optimization, our team has managed hundreds of enterprise migrations, built frameworks that consistently deliver results, and supported organizations through every phase of the journey.
Start with clarity. Book a free 30-minute strategy consultation where we assess your current platform, discuss your digital vision, and outline a migration roadmap tailored to your organization’s unique needs. Whether you’re running Drupal 7 and facing January’s deadline or evaluating platform choices for your next digital initiative, let’s turn complexity into opportunity.
Source URLs
- https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases
- https://themeisle.com/blog/cms-market-share/
- https://wpmet.com/cms-market-share/
- https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/digital-transformation/ai-tech-investment-roi.html
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/enterprise-strategy/why-2025-is-the-inflection-point-for-aws-cloud-migration/
- https://www.databricks.com/blog/supercharge-your-enterprise-bi-how-approach-your-migration-aibi
- https://duplocloud.com/blog/cloud-migration-statistics/
