Don't worry, that headline isn't mine — it came from a client. Well, not exactly a client; I just had a video call with someone who wanted to look at things from different angles before deciding whether to stick with Drupal or not.
What the client told me
- He has a website on Drupal 8 and is worried because this November Drupal 8 is going end of life. Come November, he's forced to be on Drupal 9.
- He's frustrated/disappointed because he hired an agency that built him a brand new website 1-2 years ago, and it's already obsolete (it's a Drupal 8 site).
- He's frustrated/disappointed because some parts of the site are slow. The one that worries him most is the search, which is critical on this site. It's a multilingual website with a huge number of nodes and they use Solr as the search engine.
- On the other hand, he loves the content administration and management in Drupal.
- He's considering rebuilding the entire site from scratch after only a couple of years.
What I told him about Drupal 9
- Upgrading from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 isn't as painful as it sounds. Drupal 9 is essentially the same codebase as Drupal 8, just with all the deprecated/obsolete code removed. If you've been keeping the site up to date and following best practices, the upgrade shouldn't be a problem.
- The biggest challenge when upgrading to Drupal 9 is having a lot of custom code — especially code that doesn't follow Drupal community standards. That code needs to be reviewed manually.
- You should ask the agency handling your maintenance what issues your site currently has. If you're paying someone to keep your Drupal 8 site updated every month (Drupal core and contributed modules), then you've already done 90% of the work needed to upgrade to Drupal 9.
- I've personally upgraded several sites to Drupal 9, and I maintain a few of my own contributed modules on Drupal.org that are already compatible with Drupal 9.
What I told him about performance
- The search page being slow could be caused by a thousand different things. It's not necessarily a Drupal problem. You could run into the exact same issues with any other technology.
- It could be a misconfigured Solr setup.
- Switching to Elasticsearch is worth exploring.
- It could be a non-optimized Drupal configuration (e.g., entity caches not enabled).
- I've worked on many Drupal sites (versions 7, 8, 9) and search with Solr or Elasticsearch flies when everything is properly configured.
- You might have custom code that's hurting performance.
- You might have a contributed module causing the slowdown. For example, "Active Facets Pills."
What I told him about the wasted cost of rebuilding in another technology
- Even if you want to reuse the visual design (saving on design work), frontend development is still going to take up a big chunk of the budget.
- A black hole for your budget is content migration and handling all the SEO side of things so you don't lose your rankings. (Doing it right takes time and money.)
- I think it's much better to spend the budget on optimizing the things you say are slow, or on new features you want to add — rather than spending it on redoing everything that was already built just two years ago.
- If you told me the whole Drupal setup was a mess and you hated the editing interface, that editors were going crazy trying to figure out how to edit pages... then that would be a real reason to leave Drupal. But the opposite is true — you love editing in Drupal and working with paragraphs.
Conclusions
To sum it up, this is the first time someone has come to me saying they love the admin interface, they love paragraphs, and everything is great on that front — but that it can't be acceptable for a site to become deprecated when it's barely two years old, and that Drupal is slow and the search is terrible. That there must be better technologies out there.
After the call, it seemed like he felt a lot calmer about the whole thing. I'm not sure what he'll end up doing — it's his project, his money, and his decision.
What about you? Are you having issues with your Drupal projects?
Get in touch and let's talk about how you could solve them.