Drupal 7 Upgrade to Drupal 9

Is it worth upgrading to Drupal 9?

If you are on Drupal 7 still, then it is well worth upgrading to Drupal 9 now to take advantage of the latest functionality. 

If you are on Drupal 8, then moving to Drupal 9 is straightforward as it is essentially the same codebase as the last Drupal 8 version. What this means is that there is no architectural refactoring necessary for moving from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, thus making a core version upgrade between the versions a much simpler process.

We would expect to build any new projects that we are involved with using Drupal 9.

Is it a big job to upgrade to Drupal 9?

It depends. The upgrade process is much more straightforward than the upgrade process from Drupal 6 to 7, but still comes with its own challenges.

What makes Drupal 9 so special?

• Improved mobile support: You'll notice this most on the Drupal administration pages.
• Better multi-lingual support: D7 was better than D6 at handling multiple languages, but D9 takes it to the next level.
• Configuration Management: A better process for capturing the Drupal config.
• Accessibility / HTML5 / Twig: Overhaul of the front-end technologies to improve accessibility and the theming layer.
• More functional core: With more options for structuring data and rendering content.
• Usage of external libraries: That make Drupal even more powerful and flexible.
• Drupal 9 can use BigPipe technology which can result in much quicker page renderings. For uncached pages, this will yield an improved visitor experience.