Save Your Drupal 6 Site Without Updating It
Drupal 6 was launched in 2008, and rapidly gained market share as the cool kid on the block. It took a huge bite of the content management market with a crest of 250,000+ installs. Even now, 42,000 websites still report running Drupal 6.
Unfortunately, Drupal 6 support has long since lapsed as the Drupal community has moved on to more recent versions. Some developers have left the community, while others have focused on functionality that Drupal 6 does not provide. With fewer and fewer sites using Drupal 6, the interest in supporting it has declined.
In the meantime, PHP, the code system that underpins Drupal, has updated. Many sites that required PHP 5 are stuck: service providers are no longer support that vintage of PHP. Without it, the code differences from the old version and the current version of PHP is killing websites. They will have some cryptic PHP error or just a blank white screen.
In 2020, Drupal is going to release Drupal 9. With that release, support for Drupal 7 will diminish through a process called End Of Life (EOL). Once a Drupal release goes into EOL, official support ends. This means no more new projects, no more updates, and most importantly no more bug fixes. With Drupal 7 on EOL, all official support for Drupal 6 will vanish.
The writing is on the wall: Drupal 6 is dead. If you haven’t upgraded, your website is dead.
Once size doesn’t fit all for websites. Any well used website is specific and therefore a challenge to migrate. That challenge manifests as time and cost. The barrier can be so high that it could stymie a business: stick with the old bad code or move forward? We have a way to let you move forward.
Our goal is to rescue Drupal 6 websites. With over 42,000 websites needing help, we realized someone had to do something. We offer two solutions: budget or utility. If your budget is finite, we have a solution; if you need your site utility back, we have a solution.
The Budget Model
We have a way to take your site, bring it back to life for the sake of preservation, download all of the public facing content (all your web pages), and then create a functional, static version of your website with the following features:
- Impervious to PHP versions. Your site will no longer run PHP; any concerns about PHP will go away.
- Impervious to Drupal issues. Your site will be HTML based; all content and client-side functionality will remain, but any vulnerability to Drupal issues will go away.
- Faster than before.
- More portable than before. Your web host will love how easy it is to serve out your site.
- Your site will no longer be available for dynamic editing. If your site has not been edited in some time, this may not be critical.
To get started, just fill out the form below. We will need to get your web host login information, and the login you used to access Drupal back when your Drupal site was working. After that, we can give you a specific quote to outline the final costs, what we promise to deliver and when you can expect it.
The Utility Model
Some sites are workhorses. Maybe your site had to stay with Drupal 6 because of its setup. Drupal 6 was closed down in 2014. Websites undergo upgrades and overhauls every two to three years. If your site is that old, it could do with a refresh.
We will convert your whole website from Drupal 6 to the current version of WordPress. WordPress runs ⅓ of the Internet. Its popularity makes it easy to find features and developers. Given the level of adoption of WordPress over Drupal we do not recommend that anyone migrate old installs of Drupal 6 to a higher version of Drupal. The amount of work it takes to get from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, 8 or 9, is the same as it takes to get away from Drupal altogether. Over 70% of Drupal sites are running Drupal 7, which is losing support in 2020. Those sites may also migrate away from Drupal causing its install base to plummet; possibly taking much of the support community with it. Don’t let your site get caught in the collapse..
As part of the move, we want to address the look and ask: is your site mobile ready? Drupal 6 lacked responsive themes and the modules that help create responsive content. Consider that Google punishes websites that aren’t mobile friendly.
We would:
- Preserve all site users
- Preserve all content
- Preserve interactive functionality by rebuilding that functionality into the new WordPress website.
- Replicate the site reports (called “Views” in Drupal).
- Map your old URLs to new URLs
- Give you a new look in keeping with your previous site.
- Make the new look responsive and mobile ready.
- Add security tools to keep your site protected.
- Add performance improvements to make it snappy and easy to load.
To get started, fill out the form below. We will need to get your web host login information, and the login you use to access Drupal. After that, we can give you a specific quote to outline the final costs, what we promise to deliver and when you can expect it.