Should You Migrate from Drupal 7 to 8?

To migrate or not to migrate? That is the question... Enough philosophy, let’s get to business. Drupal 7 vs Drupal 8, the battle begins.

Since we write a lot about Drupal 8, its modules and peculiarities, it’s important to cover the topic that concerns every person who has a site built on Drupal 7 or even 6: is that really necessary to migrate to the 8th version? We’ve already talked about it some time ago, in that article we’ve listed some of the reasons why you should think about upgrading your site. Now, it’s time to continue our talk by naming a few more things about Drupal 8 you might have missed so far.

What are the pros of migrating to Drupal 8?

Object oriented programming

Even though there were some OOP elements in Drupal 7, officially it has only been introduced with the latest version. Object-oriented programming (OOP) is organized around objects rather than "actions" and data rather than logic.
 
This development methodology allows programmers to create a lot more maintainable code, with almost no bugs.

Accessibility

Drupal has become even more accessible with the 8th version release, especially for visually impaired users. With the new internal method “Announce” developers can create direct output to screen readers. Even more, the TabbingManager object can limit the tabbing to those elements that are not necessary. This will help to provide smooth surfing to this group of users.

Speed

One of the main Drupal 8’s benefits is the fact that it can load pages a lot faster. This is achieved by loading JavaScript only when needed. Instead of loading the same info all over again every time a user enters it, Drupal 8 takes all the elements from the cache instead.  

And that’s not all. Drupal 8 has responsivity, new core modules, multilinguality and a lot more that we’ve already mentioned last time.

What are the cons of migrating to Drupal 8?

Cost

You have to keep in mind that the larger your site, the harder the migration process will be. The more elements and modules you have used the more changes it requires. You have to decide what is better — to migrate from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, or maybe to build a completely new site on the 8th version.

Adaptation

Drupal 8 is known for being a lot simpler to use than the 7th one. This is mostly true when it comes to non-Drupal developers, who are used to working with other CMFs. However, when speaking about those who work with Drupal 6 or 7 it can be rather tricky for them to adapt to the completely renovated framework. But when you do it eventually you realise that Drupal 8 is easier and a lot more functional.

Conclusion

With all of this said the question remains: should you migrate from Drupal 7 to 8 or not? Well, it seems to us that the 8th version is a lot more usable, easier and user friendly than the 7th one. So here’s our advice: yes, you should! But still, to migrate or not depends on different factors you should take into consideration, like how big is your site,  how many modules you used to build it, etc.

So when deciding to upgrade Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, take your time, don’t hurry and think what will work better for you. And if you still determined to migrate to Drupal 8, we will be here to help you!