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Expected time and costs of Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration

16.07.2020
Expected time and costs of Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration
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Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration is something that should bring a great value to your business. Numerous Drupal 8 improvements and the fully revamped architecture impressed everyone when the 8th version was released.

Since then, Drupal 8 kept rapidly improving with better admin usability, performance, accessibility, third-party integration, multi-language, and other most modern web practices. The 9th version arrived as an even cleaner version, boasting instant upgrades from D8, equipped with modern libraries to make sites faster, and with plenty of ambitious plans for future innovation.

You might be already tempted to migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 or 9, but there is something stopping you. You may ask yourself: how much time does it take and how much does it cost to migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9?

This question will be answered on a case-by-case basis, but we will do our best to give you the estimated time and cost of Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration in this post.

Getting ready for your Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration

Migration is always a great chance to refresh or revamp your website in many ways. To make sure the upgrade brings you the best value, as well as help the development team give you more precise estimates of Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration, you will need to do a little preparation.

Rethink your business goals: what new priorities have appeared and how would you like your website to reflect them? And, vice versa, what is no longer relevant and should be cleaned up? Talk to your admins and content editors: what functionality is missing and what could be improved in order to speed up their routine tasks?

Based on this, developers will help you review your website’s modules, configuration, UX design, and more. Some things will “travel” to the next level, some things will be replaced by more modern alternatives, some things will be cleaned-up, and so on.

How much time does it take to upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9?

The simplest of brochure sites without custom modules and with just a couple of content types can be migrated within 30 hours. However, as the site complexity grows, the migration process extends. For some websites, it can take a couple of months. The larger, the more complex, and the more custom-heavy your site is, the longer it will take to migrate. Let’s see how it works.

  • Initialization. The essence of every Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration is to move your website’s configuration and content to the newly created clean site instance. Content includes blog posts, images, files, and similar elements, while configuration is about your content types, fields, views, comment types, and so on. Developers analyze all this and decide on the migration specifics. They also prepare a fresh Drupal destination site, update your source site to the latest minor version, enable the necessary modules, etc.
  • Custom module rewriting. An important point is that your website’s custom logic in the form of custom modules will need to be rewritten according to the Drupal 8/9 standards (object-oriented programming, or OOP). This might take up a lot of the migration time.
  • Automated or manual migration process. Thanks to the migration pack of modules, it’s possible to automate many standard processes. However, in many cases, manual recreation of elements (e.g. views) is also needed. To import the website’s data in various formats (XML, CSV, RSS, etc.), developers will need to define the source and the destination. Some projects require complex field mapping, which influences the time. If you need to reorganize the content structure, it will take more time as well.
  • Validation. When the data has been migrated, developers carefully check that there are no errors and that the fields have been correctly filled with the data.
  • Website launch. When everything is thoroughly checked, developers deploy your new and shiny Drupal 8 or 9 website to live.

That said, the number of hours it takes to migrate increases when:

  • You have many custom modules.
  • Your website has a lot of content types and content.
  • Your content types need to be reorganized (split, consolidated, etc.)
  • Your content is multilingual.
  • There are custom fields on your site.
  • There is a need to recreate many views.
  • You need a website redesign.
  • And so on.

It should be noted that, even in the most complex projects, the time of Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration can always be reduced if you wish. To achieve this, you can hire a larger number of developers to perform the migration.

How much does it cost to upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9?

The cost of the Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration will depend upon the time and the hourly rate. The hourly rates may differ across companies. InternetDevels, together with our support team Drudesk that specializes in migrations, charges $30 per hour on average.

So, if a simple brochure site takes 30 hours to upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 or 9, the cost starts at $900. This looks very lucrative, doesn’t it?

Upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 or 9!

Show your website to our Drupal migration and upgrade experts team to discover the exact time and cost of your Drupal 7 to Drupal 8/9 migration. Our high-efficiency approach will allow you to save a lot of hours and budget. We also offer something totally free — our consultation and our attention. Contact us!

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