Drupal 7 reached the end of its extended support in January 2025, and most public sector sites moved off it in good time. A handful did not, usually for reasons nobody would choose: a frozen budget, a supplier contract that ran out, or a single developer holding the whole thing together. At September's show and tell, three council web teams who are now through the other side talked us through how it went.
Start with what you can delete
Every team said the same thing first. The migration got easier the moment they stopped treating the old site as something to copy. One team ran a content audit against twelve months of analytics and found that a third of their pages had not been visited by anyone outside the council in a year. Those pages were archived, not migrated, and nobody has asked for them back.
We spent two months planning a migration for content that turned out to be ours, not our residents'. Deleting it was the fastest thing we did.
Redirects are the real deliverable
Search engines, printed leaflets and bookmarked links all point at your old URLs. The teams kept a single spreadsheet of old path, new path and status, and imported it with the Redirect module at go-live. They also kept the 404 log open for the first fortnight and added redirects daily. That log is where you find the bus timetable link printed on a thousand leaflets.
Migrate API, but not for everything
Structured content such as news, events and directory entries moved cleanly with the core Migrate API and a few custom process plugins. Long, hand-built service pages did not. Two teams rewrote those by hand into LocalGov Drupal service pages, and say the content is better for it: shorter, written to the GOV.UK style guide, and with the tasks at the top.
What they would do differently
- Freeze content on the old site earlier, and give editors a clear date.
- Run accessibility checks on the new templates before migrating content into them, not after.
- Budget time for files. Old PDFs with no owner were the slowest part of every project.
All three teams have shared their redirect spreadsheets and migration modules in the community platform's Migration group. If you are still on Drupal 7, post in the group and someone who has done it will help.
