If your website is running Drupal 6, chances are it’s between 3 and 6 years old now, and once Drupal 8 comes out. Support for Drupal 6 will drop. Luckily the support window has recently been prolonged for another 3 months after Drupal 8 comes out. But still,  that leaves you only a small window of time to migrate to the latest and greatest. But why would you? 

There are many great things about Drupal 8 that will have something for everyone to love, but that should not be the only reason why you would need an upgrade. It is not the tool itself that will magically improve the traffic to your site, neither convert its users to start buying more stuff, it’s how you use the tool.  

So if your site is running Drupal 6 and hasn’t had large improvements in the last years it might be time to investigate if it needs a major overhaul to be up to par with the competition. If that’s the case, think about brand, concept, design, UX and all of that first to understand how your site should work and what it should look like, only then we can understand if a choice needs to be made to go for Drupal 7 or Drupal 8.  

If your site is still running well you might not even need to upgrade! Although community support for Drupal 6 will end a few months after Drupal 8 release, we will continue to support Drupal 6 sites and work with you to fix any security issues we encounter and collaborate with the Drupal Security Team to provide patches.

My rule of thumb is that if your site uses only core Drupal and a small set of contributed modules, it’s ok to build a new website on Drupal 8 once it comes out. But if you have a complex website running on many contributed and custom modules it might be better to wait a few months maybe a year until all becomes stable.