Every other week, I get asked this question of "Can you give me a price to upgrade my Drupal 7 website to the latest version of Drupal 9, please?".
I'm sorry to say, it's NOT that straightforward. It could be anything from a few thousands to hundreds of thousands of pounds / dollars.
This is because Drupal 9 is using a new underlying framework, both for the core and the templates. When moving from Drupal 7, it's more of a migration than an upgrade. We've written about it on our blog, but as a summary, we need to prepare a new Drupal 9 websites, then transfer your content types and pages over.
We also need to recode the templates to be compatible with the new theme engine. And finally, we need to look at anything that might have been done with custom modules in your Drupal 7.
Depending on the size and the complexity of your sites, we need to do a full audit of all the core modules to ensure they have a Drupal 9 compatible version.
We also need to look at the contributing modules from the community. And this is where it can get very tricky because not all of them might have been maintained and upgraded.
So to give you a price, I need
- Access to your source code, download the database and restore the site.
- We then need to run our audits on all the core modules, the content types, the templates... everything you have on your site.
- We can then put together an estimate and a project plan for how long each of those findings will take to upgrade.
The same is true for any other CMS or framework. The upgrades are always dependent on a lot of factors and I cannot give you a price just by looking at the front end of your website.
You can try to prepare a screenshot of all the modules, and we'll be able to give you some ballpark, but it might not be a hundred percent accurate.
The best way to progress with that is really to allocate a small budget for a couple of days to do this properly and to really know where you stand and how the upgrade is going to take place.
I hope this helps?
Feel free to get in touch if you have more question about Drupal or anything digital. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Twitter to keep learning with me and grow your career in digital.
Until next time, stay safe and see you soon.
