Drupal 10 security support ends December 9, 2026. 1 If an upgrade to Drupal 11 is on your roadmap, these are the five things worth confirming before you scope the work or put a number in front of a budget owner. This is a technical checklist, not a sales pitch. Walk through it with your own team or ours.
1. Confirm your site is on Drupal 10.3.0 or later
Drupal removed a batch of deprecated core APIs between 10.3 and 11.0. 2 If your site predates 10.3, plan on landing there first (getting current within the 10.x branch) before attempting the jump to 11. Skipping this step is a common way an upgrade stalls partway through.
2. Check PHP and hosting requirements
Drupal 11 requires PHP 8.3 or later. 3 Confirm your hosting environment (and any staging or CI pipeline) can run 8.3 before you touch the codebase. This item often has a longer lead time, especially on shared or institutional hosting where a PHP version bump means a change request to a hosting or IT services team.
3. Run Upgrade Status and inventory your contrib and custom code
Install the contributed Upgrade Status module, built for this task. 2 Run it against a staging copy of your site to get a real inventory of which contributed modules are Drupal 11-ready and which custom code touches deprecated APIs. This is the step that turns "we think it'll take a few weeks" into an actual scope.
4. Know what core dropped
A handful of core extensions were removed or deprecated heading into Drupal 11. 2 They include:
- Actions UI
- Activity Tracker
- Book
- Forum
- Statistics
- Tour
If your site relies on any of these, budget time to replace the functionality with a contributed module or a small custom build. Don't discover this mid-upgrade.
5. Stage it, back it up, then follow the Composer path
Take a full backup, set up a staging environment that mirrors production, and run database updates there first. 2 Drupal's own upgrade guide documents the Composer-based upgrade path end to end. Follow it in staging, verify the site, and only then schedule the production window.
None of this requires committing to a vendor before you've done the inventory in step 3. The step 3 inventory determines scope and cost. If your team wants a second set of eyes on the Upgrade Status output or wants us to run the assessment for you, we're glad to help.
Talk to us about your Drupal site → neverendingsolutions.com
New York State certified MBE (Empire State Development).
Related reading: Drupal 10 end of life: what NY public sector and campus teams need to know · Drupal 7 to Drupal 10: what we learned
- drupal.org: Core release cycles and support schedule, checked 2026-10-08. Drupal 10 security support ends December 9, 2026.
- drupal.org: How to upgrade from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11: minimum source version 10.3.0, Upgrade Status module, removed extensions, database updates (drush updatedb) before deploying, PHP 8.3.0+ hosting requirement (fetched 2026-10-08).
- drupal.org: Drupal 11.0.0 release: PHP 8.3 with zlib required; sites must be on 10.3+ before upgrading (fetched 2026-10-08).