As we all know that Drupal 7 has pushed its End of life to November 2022 and Drupal 8 is going to end in November 2021. After November 2021 Drupal 8 will not be going to receive any Security updates and bugs fixes. You just have to upgrade your Drupal version before November 2021 if you are using Drupal 8.

Let's explain what is End of Life means, you can understand this when the software reaches that point where it will not going to receive any security updates and not any bug fixes from the maintenance.

Even Drupal 8 is the higher version than Drupal 7 but still reaches its End of Life before Drupal 7, This is happening because Drupal 8 is the first version that is incorporated with Symfony and all other versions are based on the PHP framework developed by Drupal Community, If we talk about the end of life of Drupal 8 then it's happening because Drupal 8 is based on Symfony 3 and Symfony 3 is going to reach its End of Life in 2021

As you know that Drupal 7 is an older version than Drupal 8 but still it has been extended for 1 year, and now its end of life is on November 2022. And in 2022 Drupal 7 is going to complete 11 years. The reason behind extending the time of End of life is because of the Impact of COVID-19 on Businesses.

Some Impacts of End of Life of Drupal 7 & Drupal 8

Security Updates: Drupal will stop getting security updates after the End of Life; this will cause a high risk of hacking and security breaches.

There will be No New updates or modules available for these versions.

So now after reading till this point you are having some questions like:

Just relax; we are here to provide you all the solutions to your questions. You are not the only one who is going through this situation. A fact says that 8 out of 10 Sites are still on Drupal 7 and around 20-25% are on Drupal 8.

What will happen if we move from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9?

The Businesses which are running on Drupal 8 now only have 3 months to move to Drupal 9. When we talk about moving from 8 to 9 is much easier than the previous versions as Drupal 8 is based on the Symfony framework the migration doesn't look that harder. There are only two major differences in 8 and 9 are Updated Dependencies and Deprecated Code.

Deprecated Code

While moving to Drupal 9 or in a higher version in Drupal deprecated code will be removed.

Updated Dependencies

Drupal uses frontend and backend Libraries and it depends on them and Symfony is one of the dependencies on which Drupal 8 is depending. Drupal 8 depends on Symfony 3 and it's going to End of life in November 2021 and Drupal 9 uses Symfony 4.

Same as Symfony Drupal also depends on Twig but as there is no update from Twig about the End of life has been out for both Twig 1 and Twig 2 so now in Drupal 9 they are using Twig 2.

Migration to Drupal 9

As you know there is not so much difference between Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 but it's still much important to move from 8 to 9. As of November 2021, a website with Drupal 8 will be difficult to maintain or make changes to the website.

From November 2021 Drupal 8 will no longer receive any updates for security and bugs fixes and that will increase the risk of cyber attacks for the website and user data. And if a site is on the outdated version of Drupal then it will be hard to find hosting and integrations from a third party because the site will be going to flagged as not secure.

So, In conclusion, we can say that migrating from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is much easier if we compare it to the previous versions in the last decade.