Drupal to Next.js Migration for End-of-Life Sites

Drupal to Next.js migration is the process of moving a Drupal 7 through 11 site -- content, taxonomy, media, and URL structure -- onto a Next.js and Supabase stack that doesn't force a rewrite every time a major version ships. It's for digital directors and IT leads whose Drupal 7 site has been running unpatched since January 2025, or whose D9/D10 site is staring down another $50-200K upgrade quote before December 2026's D10 end-of-life. What changes: every node, taxonomy term, and media file gets exported and restructured into Supabase tables; every URL alias gets a matching 301 redirect at the edge so backlinks and rankings survive the move; and your content team gets a modern admin experience instead of Drupal's stock UI. What doesn't change: your content hierarchy, your internal linking, your SEO equity. Typical timeline runs 3 to 10 weeks depending on site size -- a small marketing site with under 500 pages wraps in 3-4 weeks, a large site with 5,000+ pages and 50+ content types takes 6-10 weeks. Multi-site networks are scoped per site with a volume discount. Cost runs $10-25K for small sites, $25-50K for medium, and $50-80K for large ones, fixed-fee, quoted after a free audit of your content type inventory. Compare that to a $50-200K Drupal upgrade that delivers zero new features and leaves you back on the same treadmill in two years.

Who this is for -- and when it's the wrong move

This is for teams on Drupal 7, which stopped getting security patches in January 2025, or on Drupal 9/10 facing another upgrade quote before D10 goes end-of-life in December 2026. It's also for Drupal Multi-site networks, where every version bump multiplies across every site sharing the codebase -- see our dedicated Drupal Multi-site migration page if that's your situation. If your content editors are locked into Drupal's admin UI with no headless preview, or your Acquia/Pantheon bill has climbed past what the Lighthouse scores justify, that's a signal too.

It's the wrong move if you're already comfortably on D10 or D11, your contrib modules are current, and nothing is forcing a decision right now -- there's no reason to migrate just because a different stack exists. It's also not worth it for a small brochure site where a straight Drupal upgrade would genuinely cost less than a rebuild. And if you've got deep custom investment in Drupal Commerce or Rules-based workflows, get a rebuild-cost estimate before you commit; sometimes it's the deciding factor either way. Our Drupal vs Next.js comparison walks through the tradeoffs if you're still deciding.

How we do it

The extraction method depends on your Drupal version. D7 has no REST API by default, so we pull content straight from the MySQL database with Node.js scripts that flatten D7's Entity-Attribute-Value field storage into clean Supabase tables -- handling CCK fields, Views, and Panels/Display Suite layouts (which become React component compositions) along the way. D8 through D11 ship JSON:API at /jsonapi/node/[content_type], so we paginate through every content type, resolve entity references, and map Paragraphs to either JSONB fields or related tables depending on how they're queried.

Redirects get the same attention regardless of version. We export every URL alias from Drupal's url_alias (D7) or path_alias (D8+) table, map each one to its new Next.js path, and implement 301s through vercel.json or Next.js middleware. Handled this way, 301 redirects preserve ranking signal rather than resetting it -- we submit updated sitemaps to Google Search Console on launch day and watch 404s in Vercel analytics for 30 days after.

The engagement runs in four phases:

• Audit (Week 1): we inventory every content type, field, taxonomy vocabulary, View, webform, and custom module, and flag what gets migrated, dropped, or rebuilt.
• Schema design and data migration (Weeks 2-3): Supabase schema design, migration scripts, and validation against a staging environment.
• Frontend build (Weeks 3-6): Next.js pages, components, and server actions. We don't recreate the Drupal theme pixel-for-pixel -- this is the point where the UI gets modernized.
• Redirects, QA, launch (Weeks 5-8): redirect mapping, cross-browser testing, Core Web Vitals checks, and DNS cutover.

What you get at the end: a Supabase Postgres schema mapped to your content model, a Next.js codebase running on Vercel, a complete redirect map, an admin handover with real-time content previews, and 30 days of post-launch monitoring.

What we've shipped

We've rebuilt legacy CMS platforms onto this exact stack before, even when the source system wasn't Drupal. SleepDr.com moved from WordPress to Next.js 15 + Payload CMS + Supabase, with a HIPAA-safe architecture, medical schema, 20 city landing pages, and four-language support. Lighthouse went from 35 to 94, verified by a 5.0 Clutch review -- the same performance jump we're targeting on a Drupal migration, since both platforms hit the same PHP rendering ceiling.

Not Another Sunday runs entirely on the destination stack: Next.js 15, Supabase, and Vercel, with 137,000 listings and 10,500 coffees ranked by a custom quality score, plus hundreds of programmatic SEO pages and a crawl-budget strategy that keeps thin pages out of the index. That last part matters directly for Drupal migrations -- when you're moving tens of thousands of nodes, you want a plan for which ones deserve to be indexed, not a wholesale dump into Next.js's sitemap.

Sources

Drupal 7's end-of-life status is documented by the Drupal Association at drupal.org/about/drupal-7/d7eol. Our redirect methodology follows Google's guidance on 301 redirects, performance targets are benchmarked against Core Web Vitals, and the rebuilt codebase follows the patterns in the Next.js App Router documentation.

If you're holding a Drupal upgrade quote and wondering whether it's worth paying one more time, get a free migration audit instead. We'll pull your content type inventory, estimate the data volume, and hand you a fixed-price proposal within a week -- talk to us or check the pricing bands first.