5 Reasons why you should upgrade to Drupal 9

Drupal is an enterprise grade, open-source, web content management platform that powers the digital experiences of some the world’s most recognisable brands.

Drupal 9 was launched in June 2020 and here are 5 reasons why your business should upgrade to this latest version:

 

1. End of life of Drupal 7 and 8

The Drupal Security Team and The Drupal Community (of which there are over 20,000 active members) will soon stop supporting Drupal 7 and 8. This means they will no longer be creating security updates for those versions of the software, potentially compromising your company’s cybersecurity.

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2. Continued focus on Headless CMS

Drupal 8 and now Drupal 9 take an API-first approach to give organisations more freedom when designing the user experience. The front-end or the experience layer of the website can be written in a variety of Javascript Frameworks (like React for example). This structure allows for a ‘create once, publish anywhere’ approach, which streamlines processes and enables consistent cross platforms experiences.

 

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3. The easiest upgrade in a decade

When compared with some CMS’s, Drupal is incredibly easy to install, manage and keep up to date. However, moving from Drupal 8 to 9 is by far the easiest major upgrade that Drupal has had. Drupal.org provides a detailed guide here. The team behind Drupal are also making a commitment to easy upgrades into the future.

 

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4. Enhanced Security and Performance (yes 2 for the price of 1!)

In this version of Drupal all obsolete code from previous versions has been removed which means potential for security issues has been drastically reduced. Drupal was already one of the most secure platforms to run digital experiences but this new release has taken that to the next level. Having been built from the ground up, Drupal 9 is also introducing new core modules that will improve the performance of your digital experiences.

 

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5. Mobile-First approach

Drupal 8 was designed with mobile experiences in mind however Drupal 9 has taken a giant leap forward. Drupal 9 supports responsive images, ensuring the correct size image is displayed based on the user’s device. Combined with the ‘create once, publish anywhere’ approach of headless CMS, this feature will improve the speed of web pages, reduce data usage and improve the content management process.

 

We hope this has given you an insight into the many benefits of using Drupal 9. Our team is comprised of highly experienced engineers that love to chat about Drupal so please don’t hesitate in getting in touch if you would like to discuss a project with them.

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