Planning for the Drupal 10 end of life

Although December might still feel a way off, successful, stress-free upgrades require a little forward planning. Here is what this actually means for your organisation and why you should begin mapping out your move to Drupal 11 today.

Why the upgrade matters

With the introduction of a predictable, biennial release cycle for Drupal upgrades, we now have clear timelines for how long each version remains supported.

When a Drupal version reaches its end of life, it does not mean a website will suddenly stop working or disappear from the internet. However, it does mean the global Drupal community will stop providing official security advisories, bug fixes and core updates for that version.

Staying on an unsupported platform comes with significant operational risks.

1. Security vulnerabilities

The most critical reason to upgrade is security. Once 9 December passes, new vulnerabilities discovered in Drupal 10 core will not be patched. Malicious actors actively target unsupported software, meaning an EOL site quickly becomes a liability for your data and user trust.

2. Dependency drift

Drupal relies on underlying open-source technologies like PHP and Symfony. As these external components evolve and older versions reach their own end of life, hosting providers will phase them out. Staying on Drupal 10 means you will eventually find yourself unable to upgrade your server environment or PHP versions, leading to performance bottlenecks and compliance issues.

3. Missing out on innovation

Drupal 11 is faster, lighter and packed with fantastic new capabilities, particularly around the new intuitive page-building experiences and AI-assisted content tools. Staying stuck on Drupal 10 means your content editors and developers miss out on features that make running a website smoother and more efficient.

Next steps for clients

At Annertech, our Managed Services team is auditing and preparing our clients' sites for Drupal 11. Every website is unique, which is why we evaluate each client individually and design a tailored plan on a case-by-case basis. In fact, we have been proactively discussing the Drupal 10 end-of-life roadmap with our clients since the beginning of 2026.

Our goal is to handle the heavy lifting – managing the technical inventory, code updates and deployment pipelines – so your internal team can focus on what they do best.

To give you an idea of how we are approaching this, here are the two main pathways we are taking to get sites Drupal 11-ready.

The Drupal 11 pathway: 90-minute rapid prep

We are using an agile, practical approach to manage our clients’ move to Drupal 11.

We have dedicated a fixed block of 90 minutes to actively updating a site's major dependencies. This rapid-prep session is designed to thoroughly prime the site for Drupal 11. In many cases – especially where clients have kept their sites regularly updated – we are actually managing to complete the full upgrade to Drupal 11 within that single 90-minute window.

If your site requires a bit more care to make the leap, this session still serves as crucial prep work, making the final upgrade a much simpler, separate task down the line.

Moving LocalGov Drupal sites to drupal.org

For our LocalGov Drupal (LGD) clients, there is a vital technical house-cleaning task we are undertaking: updating the LGD namespace from its old GitHub home over to drupal.org.

This is not just a hard prerequisite for upgrading to Drupal 11, but it also ensures your site can seamlessly receive future upstream updates and security patches from the wider LGD project. We are managing this transition smoothly behind the scenes to keep the sites fully aligned with the community.

What you need to do now

If your site is currently on Drupal 10, there is no need to panic. Upgrades in modern Drupal are vastly different from the major overhauls of the past (like the leap from Drupal 7 to 8). Instead of a ground-up rebuild, moving from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11 is a sequential, incremental update.

Ready for the upgrade?

If you are already an Annertech client, rest assured that we are already working behind the scenes to make your transition to Drupal 11 as smooth as possible. We will be in touch with you directly to discuss your custom roadmap.

But if you have any immediate questions about your website's upgrade path, or if you are running a Drupal site and want some expert help making the leap, please get in touch. We are here to make the transition easy, painless and entirely stress-free.