Drupal 11.0 was released on August 2, 2024. Since then, the question we hear most from clients running Drupal 10 is simple: do we need to upgrade now?

For most sites the honest answer is no, not this month. But you should know what the upgrade involves, start removing the blockers now, and put a date on it. Here is how we think about it.

Drupal 10 is not going away yet

Drupal 10 continues to receive security support until Drupal 12 is released, which is currently expected in 2026. That gives most site owners a comfortable window. There is no security reason to rush an upgrade in the weeks after a major release, and waiting a few months lets contributed modules catch up.

The comparison that matters is not Drupal 10 versus Drupal 11 today. It is "upgrade calmly in 2025" versus "upgrade under pressure in 2026 because support is ending". The second option is always more expensive.

What actually changed in Drupal 11

Drupal's major releases are deliberately less dramatic than they used to be. Since Drupal 8, new features arrive in minor releases, and a major release mainly removes deprecated code and raises platform requirements. Much of what people associate with Drupal 11 already shipped in Drupal 10.3.

The changes that affect upgrade planning are:

  • Higher platform requirements. Drupal 11 requires PHP 8.3 and newer database versions, including MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6. It moves to Symfony 7 and jQuery 4 under the hood.
  • Deprecated APIs are removed. Any custom or contributed code that still uses APIs deprecated in Drupal 10 will break.
  • Some modules left core. Several older modules were removed from core and now live as contributed projects, including Book, Forum, Statistics, Tour, Activity Tracker and Actions UI. If your site uses one of them, you will need to add the contributed version before upgrading.
  • Performance improvements. Drupal 11 includes work on caching and rendering that makes many sites faster without any changes on your side.

How to tell if your site is ready

You can answer this with a few hours of investigation rather than guesswork.

Check your hosting

Confirm that your hosting supports PHP 8.3 and the required database versions in every environment you use, including local development and staging. On older managed hosting this is sometimes the slowest part of the whole process.

Run Upgrade Status

The Upgrade Status module scans your custom code and installed contributed projects and lists everything that is not compatible with Drupal 11. It is the single most useful tool for planning this upgrade.

Review contributed modules

For each contributed module, check whether a Drupal 11 compatible release exists. Popular modules were ready quickly. Smaller or abandoned modules may never be updated, and those are the ones to deal with first: find a replacement, help the maintainer, or move the functionality into custom code.

Fix custom code

Custom modules and themes need their deprecated API calls replaced. The Drupal Rector tool can automate a large share of these changes. The rest is ordinary development work, and the effort depends on how much custom code your site has and how well it was written.

When to upgrade

Our general advice:

  • New projects should start on Drupal 11 as long as the contributed modules you need support it. There is no reason to begin a new build on the older major version.
  • Existing Drupal 10 sites should plan the upgrade for 2025. Use the remaining months of 2024 to get onto the latest Drupal 10 minor release, fix deprecations and confirm hosting. Then schedule the upgrade itself once your contributed modules are ready.
  • Sites still on Drupal 7 have a different and more urgent problem. Drupal 7 reaches end of life on January 5, 2025. We cover what that means in a separate post.

Doing the preparation work early has a side benefit. Code without deprecations is easier to maintain no matter which version it runs on, and each upgrade becomes smaller.

What an upgrade costs

For a well-maintained Drupal 10 site that is already on the latest minor release, the move to Drupal 11 is usually a modest project measured in days, not months. The cost rises with the amount of custom code, the number of contributed modules without Drupal 11 releases, and any hosting changes that need to happen first.

If your site skipped minor updates for a long time, expect to spend more of the budget catching up on Drupal 10 before the Drupal 11 work begins.

Not sure where your site stands? Contact us and we will run an upgrade readiness check and give you a clear plan.