Short answer: a Drupal 7 or 9 to Drupal 11 migration succeeds or fails on three decisions made before any code is written: audit and cut contrib modules, rebuild the content model around what editors publish today, and write the rollback plan first. Typical mid-size migrations run 8 to 16 weeks.
Migrating Drupal 7 or 9 to Drupal 11 is less about code and more about decisions. Here is the field guide we use on government and university migrations.
Audit modules first
Half of the modules in a five-year-old Drupal site are abandoned, redundant, or replaced by core. Catalogue every contrib module, mark each as keep, replace, or drop.
Model content before you migrate
If you migrate the old content model unchanged, you carry forward years of accidental decisions. Spend a week with editors and rebuild the model around what they actually publish today.
The migration is the cheapest moment to fix your information architecture.
Plan the rollback
Every migration plan should start with the rollback. DNS, database snapshot, asset bucket, and CDN cache. If you cannot revert in 30 minutes, you have not planned the launch.
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