6 Reasons Why You Need To Upgrade Your Drupal Website

It goes without saying that (software) upgrades improve the overall performance of websites. Drupal is no exception. 

Regular updates to the Drupal core benefit not just the site owners in terms of security but also help deliver better user experience. 
 
Businesses should regularly update their websites to make them faster, secure, and easier to use.

Here’s why upgrading your Drupal website is crucial.

Why upgrading your website is important

Below are a few reasons you should prioritize upgrading your website.

1. Security: Between November 2020 and October 2021, 5212 organizations worldwide experienced data breaches (source: statista). Delays before security updates are applied on site can result in compromised sites as seen in Drupalgeddon.
   
   Acquia is known to have observed more than 100,000 attacks a day.
   
   The scale and the severity of this Drupalgeddon brings to fore the importance of keeping websites updated on time. When enterprises fail to upgrade their sites on time, chances of it being compromised are very high.
   
   Websites that do not receive security upgrades are vulnerable to hacker assaults. The Drupal Security Team issues security announcements for all core vulnerabilities contributed modules that are very critical (labeled "highly critical"), requiring that available upgrades be implemented as soon as feasible. 
    
2. Support & Maintenance: Community support is what enables Drupal's continual evolution as an open source CMS. The community support for Drupal 7 will wane as it approaches end of life since the Drupal community is actively prioritizing and concentrating on the security of subsequent versions. 
    
3. Improved design and cost effective: The design of your website accounts for 94% of consumers' first impressions. So, if your website design is unappealing or unpleasant to users, your visitors will bounce off. Further, 38% of website visitors do not engage with an unattractive website, and the design alone accounts for 73% of your website's trustworthiness. The online equivalent may be your website, which deters potential customers from utilizing your services or purchasing your goods. It might no longer be a symbol of excellence. So an upgrade to the design is absolutely needed. A revamp is necessary, in my opinion, every year or two.
    
4. New Functionalities: Another consequence of failing to apply timely upgrades  is that certain functionalities may cease to perform as intended. Not only can this cause extra annoyance among website maintainers, but resolving these issues may incur additional expenditures for your company owing to the time and resources required to do so. 
    
5. Technology Benefit: Technology has also advanced, enabling us to forgo conventional, cumbersome Javascript writing in favor of more user-friendly and feature-rich ways to significantly enhance the user experience (JQuery, Prototype, etc.). corner boxes and shadows. HTML5 and CSS3 may significantly improved websites.
    
6. Improved Speed: Your website has to load as quickly as possible since Google now considers page load time as a ranking factor. It's possible that your older website might use a speed boost to obtain some additional Google points using the new technologies and techniques for speeding up websites. Images should be optimized, compression should be used on the server, web pages should be cached, and CSS and Javascript should be minified.

Drupal for a better digital experience

Drupal is popular among enterprises because of its flexibility, modularity, and authoring experience. Drupal also provides several more perks and advantages that make it one of the top CMS.

Here are some advantages that businesses might gain by developing a website using a Drupal-based platform:

• Being an open-source platform, Drupal has strong community support that makes website upgrade/migration for consistent branding simple.
• Drupal as an enterprise CMS, provides a full range of functionality, including multi site management, themes, SEO, content control, and connectors.
• It lets companies provide digital experiences consistently and uniformly across all of their journey's channels.

Even if we are aware of the numerous advantages that Drupal provides or the features that are more companies, marketers, and even digital agencies to this CMS, there are a number of factors that set Drupal CMS apart.

• Content Presentation With A Headless Architecture
• Personalization With Machine Learning And Predictive UX
• Chatbots To Drive The Business Value
• Exploring Markets With Augmented Reality (AR) And Virtual Reality (VR)

New Drupal Upgrades since Drupal 7

As of right now, Drupal 10 has just launched, and Drupal 7 is walking towards it's End of Life. It is advised that companies utilizing Drupal 7 start preparing for their migration to Drupal 10 immediately. Some of the features that set Drupal 10 apart as a unique version with some brand-new feature additions and some feature updates are listed below.

1. Automatic updates - The goal of Drupal's Automatic Updates is to address some of the most challenging usability issues that arise when managing Drupal websites. Updates to the production, development, and staging environments are included, and certain integrations with the current CI/CD procedures are also necessary.
2. Project browser - The Project Browser simplifies module discovery for site builders. When you pick a module, you will be given instructions on how to install it on your site. This browser is embedded into the Drupal site, so you don't have to leave it to search for modules.
3. jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Forms- Drupal 10 runs on PHP 8, which will be phased out by November 2022. jQuery UI. Furthermore, Internet Explorer 11 and Drupal 10 are incompatible. Modern JavaScript components could someday take the role of the jQuery user interface.
4. New themes: Olivero & Claro - The Drupal 7 "Seven" theme from 2009 gave off an out-of-date system impression. Seven was replaced by the new "Claro" theme, which was created in accordance with the most recent requirements. The front-end theme, "Olivero," was created to fit with features that are well-liked by users, such as the Layout Builder. The Olivero theme will be WCAG AA compliant.
5. CKEditor 5 update from CKEditor 4 - Another outstanding upgrade in Drupal 10 is the new WYSIWYG editor. It is challenging to characterize it as just an upgrade of CKEditor from version 4 to version 5 because all the code was written from scratch.

This is not all here are some more insights on Drupal 10 features and modules

Conclusion 

Drupal's modular design and ready-to-use configurations offer quick market entry and the capacity to keep up with technological advancement. One of the top technologies reshaping the IT sector is Drupal, which gives organizations the adaptability and scalability to develop while keeping in mind the needs and preferences of their users.

As Drupal 10 is here, and most  businesses are planning their migration, We at OpenSenseLabs assist businesses in offering a superior digital experience. Email us at [email protected] so that our Drupal experts can assist you.