The Drupal Association has extended Drupal 7's end of life once more, now set for January 5, 2025, citing the sheer number of sites that still run it. If you operate one of those sites, you just received roughly eighteen months. The question is whether that time becomes a migration or another stretch of comfortable procrastination.
The extension changes the deadline, not the trajectory. Contributed module maintainers have been moving on for years, hosting platforms are winding down Drupal 7 support tiers, and the pool of developers who want to work on it shrinks every quarter. A platform can be officially supported and practically fading at the same time, and Drupal 7 is.
Eighteen months is comfortable for most migrations and tight for complex ones. A content site with standard modules can move to modern Drupal in a few months. A site with years of custom module development needs discovery first, because those modules do not migrate. They get rewritten or retired, and finding out which takes time you want to spend now, not in the fall of 2024 alongside everyone else who waited.
Our recommendation is to spend a little of the reprieve immediately: a module inventory and migration assessment now, while it is cheap and calm. Then you can schedule the real work on your terms. The sites that will hurt in 2025 are not the complicated ones. They are the ones that treated each extension as permission to stop thinking about it.
