PLEASE NOTE: This article is high level in nature. To get exact cost scenarios of a typical Drupal 7 migration, please read:
Estimated cost of Drupal 7 migration
Time is running out to migrate websites out of Drupal 7 into something else. So far, our quickest migration required a team of 4 people over a period of 3 months – or about $200,000. A website of medium complexity recently required a team of 5 people over a period of 6 months – or about $500,000. Our most complex Drupal migration is expected to take 6 people about 18 months – or about $2,000,000.
Given that Drupal 7 is expected to lose its support in a little over a year and it could take the best part of a year to prepare and migrate, organizations are running out of time, especially if you have not budgeted for this and have to wait for the next budget cycle.
What makes matters worse is the news Drupal 7 AND Drupal 8 will both expire at the same time, yet Drupal 9 – as of the time of this writing – is not even ready for prime time. So what are organizations to do? Wait for D9 to be ready or migrate from D7 to D8 and then a few months later migrate again from D8 to D9?
Well, the good news, I suppose, is that, according to Dries Buytaert founder and creator of Drupal, migrating from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 will be easy, seamless, and mostly automatic. It will be as easy, according to Dries, as migrating from say Drupal 8.2 to Drupal 8.3.
According to the Drupal organization behind Drupal, 90% of the work to migrate to Drupal 8 is accomplished by migrating to Drupal 8. So, migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 is the stepping stone to Drupal 9. Don’t wait for D9 to become stable. Plan to migrate now from D7 to D8 and once D9 is stable, migrate again. If the effort to migrate from D7 to D8 is say 10 man-months then the effort to migrate from D8 to D9 should be less than one man-month.
