If your website runs on Drupal 10, an important date is about seven weeks away. On December 9, 2026, Drupal 10 reaches end of life, the same week Drupal 12 is scheduled for release. After that date, the Drupal community will stop issuing security fixes for it. Your website will not switch off or break on December 10, but every vulnerability discovered from that point forward will remain open unless you have a plan in place.
For organizations with a dedicated development team, this is a routine upgrade cycle. For small businesses, nonprofits and associations that had a Drupal site built years ago and have not thought about it since, it is often the moment they discover how much the site has drifted out of date. It is also a natural point to step back and ask whether Drupal is still the right website platform at all.
Why end of life matters more than it sounds
Open-source platforms like Drupal are secure largely because a community continually finds and fixes weaknesses. Once a version reaches end of life, that work stops for it. Attackers know this, and older, unsupported versions become attractive targets precisely because the holes in them are no longer being closed.
There are practical consequences as well. Hosting providers gradually stop supporting the older PHP versions that unsupported platforms depend on. Contributed modules move on to newer versions and leave old ones behind. Organizations that handle payments, donations or personal information may find that an unsupported platform raises questions with payment processors, insurers or compliance requirements. None of this happens overnight, but it all moves in one direction.
Your three realistic options
Upgrade to Drupal 11
For sites that genuinely benefit from Drupal’s strengths, such as complex content structures, granular user permissions or large multi-section publications, upgrading within Drupal is the natural path. One detail catches many people off guard: Drupal 12 can only be reached from Drupal 11.3 or later, so a Drupal 10 site cannot jump straight to the newest version. The upgrade path runs through Drupal 11, and the effort involved depends heavily on how many contributed modules and custom features the site relies on.
Move to a different platform
Many Drupal sites belonging to small and mid-sized organizations were built on Drupal years ago because a particular developer preferred it, not because the organization needed what Drupal does best. If your team finds the site difficult to update, relies on a single outside developer for small changes, or uses only a fraction of the platform’s capabilities, a move to WordPress is often the more practical long-term choice. WordPress is easier for non-technical staff to manage, has a very large support ecosystem, and tends to cost less to maintain.
Olea Works has been moving websites between platforms for more than two decades, and Drupal to WordPress is one of the moves we handle most often. Our proprietary replication process is designed to rebuild a site on the new platform so it looks and works the way it always has, with page addresses redirected and search details carried over. One of the larger projects completed with this process was a 400-page Drupal website for a regional youth-development nonprofit, rebuilt as a custom WordPress site in six weeks. From there we ended up going further by building custom functions and features in their new wordpress website that served their organization and the public in ways their previous Drupal website never had. They went from a highly restrictive website platform to a website platform and environment that encouraged growth and expression, and their numbers grew.
Stay on Drupal 10 with extended support
Some commercial vendors offer extended security support for end-of-life Drupal versions. This can be a reasonable bridge for an organization that needs more time to plan and budget, but it is a temporary measure with ongoing costs, not a long-term solution. It also does nothing to address the underlying age of the site.
How to decide which path fits your organization
The right choice depends less on the technology and more on how your organization uses its website. A few questions usually clarify things quickly. Who updates the site day to day, and how comfortable are they doing it? How much of the site depends on custom code or specialized modules? Is the design still serving you, or has it been a source of frustration for a while? What does a year of maintenance cost now, and how would that change on a different platform?
If the honest answers suggest that the site is hard to manage, rarely updated and expensive to keep running, an upgrade within Drupal may simply extend the same problems into a new version. If the site is complex, actively used and well supported, upgrading may be the smarter investment.
As part of our website platform assessments, Olea Works has developed a proprietary method for weighing these factors, looking at a site’s structure, modules, integrations, content volume and the way staff actually use it, before recommending a direction. It is often the case that the platform question answers itself once the full picture is in view.
Protecting what the site has earned
Whatever path you choose, the biggest risk in any migration is losing the value the current site has built: its search rankings, inbound links, page addresses that customers have bookmarked and content that has accumulated over years. A careful website platform migration maps every important page to its new location with permanent redirects, carries over titles and descriptions, preserves media and documents, and keeps the old site running until the new one is fully tested and live.
Rankings can still shift for a few weeks after any platform change while search engines catch up, and nobody can guarantee they will not. What good planning does is give the new site the best possible starting point.
Timing matters
Seven weeks is enough time to make a decision and start work, but it is not much time to complete a large migration, especially with the holidays in between. For most organizations, the sensible approach is to decide on a direction now, put basic protections in place for the period after December 9, and schedule the upgrade or move for early 2027 rather than rushing it. A rushed migration done to beat a deadline usually creates more problems than a well-planned one completed a few weeks later.
If your site is still on Drupal 7, which reached end of life in January 2025, the situation is more urgent. Those sites have been without community security support for nearly two years.
Planning your Drupal move or upgrade
If you are not sure which version of Drupal your site runs, or you would like a clear recommendation on whether to upgrade or move, Olea Works can help. We assess your site, explain your options in plain language and handle the rebuild using our replication process, from the first page inventory to launch day. Learn more about our website platform upgrades and rebuilds, or tell us about your site.