Drupal 10 end of life: upgrade to Drupal 11 before 9 December
Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026, the same week Drupal 12 arrives. Here’s why your next move is Drupal 11, and why you need to start now.
Quick question: is your website running Drupal 10?
If the answer is “yes”, “probably” or “erm, I’d have to ask someone”, keep reading. Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026. That’s five weeks away, and right in the middle of Christmas party season. Not ideal timing, I know.
What happens on 9 December?
Your Drupal 10 site won’t fall over at midnight. It’ll still load, your editors will still log in and nobody will send you a sad email. What changes is that the Drupal Security Team stops releasing fixes for Drupal 10. From then on, when someone finds a vulnerability in Drupal 10 core, it stays open on your site.
It gets worse slowly, too. Contributed module maintainers will move their effort to Drupal 11 and 12, so the modules your site depends on will stop getting Drupal 10 releases. And if you hold personal data on your website (contact forms, accounts, orders), running software with no security support is a hard thing to defend under GDPR.
Drupal 12 arrives the same week
To make December even more exciting, Drupal 12.0.0 is scheduled for the week of 7 December 2026 (opens in a new tab), alongside Drupal 11.5.0. So you might be tempted to skip a version and jump straight from 10 to 12. Please don’t.
A brand new major release of Drupal core is only half the story. Your site also runs on contributed modules, and in our experience it takes three to six months for most of them to catch up with a new major version. Upgrade on day one and you’re the one finding the gaps.
That’s why we don’t move clients to a new major release straight away. Drupal 11 is the stable, well-supported place to be right now: Drupal 11 keeps getting security releases after Drupal 12 arrives, with 11.4.x supported until 21 April 2027 and 11.5 released alongside Drupal 12.
What a Drupal 10 to 11 upgrade involves
The good news: going from Drupal 10 to 11 happens in place. If you remember the leap from Drupal 7, relax. Your content, users and configuration stay where they are, and the work is in what sits around them:
- Check your hosting. Drupal 11 needs a newer stack than Drupal 10, starting with PHP 8.3 or newer, so your server may need updating first.
- Audit your modules. We run Upgrade Status (opens in a new tab) to see which contributed modules have a Drupal 11 release, which need updating and which have been abandoned and need replacing.
- Fix your custom code. Drupal deprecates old APIs before it removes them, so any custom modules and themes need their deprecated code updated. Drupal Rector (opens in a new tab) handles a lot of this automatically, and a developer handles the rest.
- Test, then upgrade. We run the whole upgrade on a copy of your site first, test it properly, then switch it over when you’re happy.
How long that takes depends on how much custom code and how many contributed modules your site has. That’s why you shouldn’t leave it until the week of 7 December.
And then Drupal 12
Once your site is on Drupal 11, Drupal 12 stops being a deadline and becomes a plan. When the contributed modules your site relies on are stable on Drupal 12, we audit your custom code for deprecations and anything worth optimising along the way, then upgrade you. Drupal 12 needs PHP 8.5 (opens in a new tab), so we check your hosting again too. No panic, no Christmas party disasters.
Don’t leave it until December
If your site is on Drupal 10 and you don’t have an upgrade booked, now’s the time. Talk to one of our friendly experts, with no obligation: we’ll tell you what your upgrade involves and how quickly we can do it.
We’ve been building on Drupal since 2008, our whole team is in-house and UK-based, and we’d much rather help you upgrade now than help you clean up later.
Not sure what’s under the bonnet? Our website systems audit finds your Drupal version, custom code, modules and integrations, and what each one needs. And once you’re upgraded, a support plan keeps you patched so you don’t face this cliff edge again.
