The benefits of migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10: Enhanced features and performance

Improved performance

Drupal 10 uses the Symfony 5 framework, which offers significant performance improvements over Drupal 7's architecture. Symfony was built from the ground up as a high-performance PHP framework, with speed and efficiency as its primary goals.

The underlying code and architectural patterns used in Drupal 10 follow Symfony's best practices, optimised for blazing fast performance. Things like caching, routing, templating and page rendering have all been redesigned in Drupal 10 to take advantage of Symfony's performance-oriented components.

Drupal 10 also includes vastly improved caching mechanisms. It can now cache entire responses instead of fragments, resulting in faster page delivery after initial generation. The cache tagging system uses Symfony's cache component to manage cache invalidation more efficiently. With granular cache tags, only related elements need to be invalidated, eliminating unnecessary cache flushes.

In addition, Drupal 10 aggregates front-end JavaScript and CSS assets, resulting in fewer http requests from the browser. It also minifies these files, reducing their size and allowing for faster downloads. The front-end build process is further optimised using modern tools such as Webpack.

Drupal 10 is designed to scale efficiently and take advantage of multiple processor cores/threads for better concurrency and parallelism. It follows Symfony's best practice of separating code into decoupled services rather than monolithic objects.

Enhanced security

Drupal 10 automatically applies security updates to core, contributed modules and themes. This makes the update process much easier for site administrators compared to Drupal 7 where updates had to be manually tracked and applied. Automated updates prevent sites from running outdated code with known vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.

Drupal 10 is built on top of the Symfony framework which incorporates robust security components designed for modern PHP applications. These include input sanitisation, output encoding, CSRF tokens, rate limiting and more. Symfony follows security best practices out of the box making Drupal 10 far less susceptible to code injection risks like cross-site scripting and SQL injection compared to previous versions.

Drupal 10 also provides very granular user permissions allowing site owners to implement the principle of least privilege when it comes to access. This means only providing users and site administrators the bare minimum privileges needed to perform their tasks, reducing the damage a compromised account can do. For example, admin roles can be customised to only allow access to manage certain types of content, not the whole site.

Additional automated security testing tools have been incorporated into the Drupal 10 development workflow itself to identify and fix vulnerabilities proactively before releases. Checks for cross-site scripting, SQL injection and other vulnerabilities are now run automatically with each code change to stay on top of emerging threats.

Improved SEO and accessibility

Drupal 10 incorporates the latest web standards and development best practices that benefit both SEO and accessibility.

For SEO, Drupal 10 sites are built using semantic HTML5 markup that helps search engines accurately crawl, index and understand pages. Other enhancements include support for proper metadata tags, microformats and structuring content in machine-readable formats. This enables search engines to better interpret Drupal sites and rank pages higher.

The new Layout Builder in Drupal 10 uses semantic Section elements to demarcate page regions. This provides clearer page outlines that assist search engine crawlers in understanding page layouts and content hierarchy.

Drupal 10 also adds several automated testing tools to enhance accessibility for users with disabilities. Checks are performed against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 to ensure compliance with recommended contrast ratios, alt text, ARIA roles and other standards that enable usage by those needing assistive technologies like screen readers.

Additionally, the move towards decoupled Drupal architecture also benefits SEO and accessibility. Keeping the back-end content delivery separate from the front-end presentation layer allows the same content to be optimised for different types of devices and channels. Headless Drupal content can be leveraged across multiple platforms.

Easier site building

Drupal 10 introduces major improvements to site building and development workflows through configuration management.

Configuration management allows reusable components like content types, views, blocks etc. to be easily exported into code through YAML files and configuration schemas. This brings more consistency between development, staging and production environments. Features modules help manage and deploy these reusable configurations between sites.

Standardised YAML files and consistent schemas also enable Drupal sites, functionality and components to be reliably reproduced and shared across different projects. This aids in maintaining development standards and best practices across teams.

Drupal 10 also modernizes frontend workflows by incorporating modern JavaScript build tools like Webpack instead of relying on monolithic themes. Themes can now simply provide reusable UI patterns and libraries that can be compiled and optimised using industry standard tools.

Developers no longer have to worry about manually clearing caches after updating code. Database schema changes have been reduced as well through the use of custom entity definitions. Additionally, testing tools like Rector help automatically fix changes needed in custom module code when upgrading between major versions of Drupal. This smooths out the upgrade process.

Better mobile support

Drupal 10 adopts a mobile-first philosophy in its design and architecture. The goal is to provide a seamless responsive mobile experience right out of the box without needing to build separate mobile themes.

To achieve this, Drupal 10 uses the latest web development standards and best practices tailored for the mobile experience. This includes extensive use of Flexbox CSS layouts that adapt elegantly to different screen sizes, responsive images that adjust based on device resolution, and mobile-friendly navigation patterns.

The new BigPipe rendering system also provides significantly faster initial page loads on mobile devices compared to Drupal 7. This is achieved by streaming page assets to the client as they become available rather than waiting for the entire page to be generated on the server.

Several other mobile UX improvements have been built into the Drupal 10 core for a polished experience. These include better support for touch and tap interfaces, no-touch zooming on mobile browsers, enforcing minimum legible font sizes, and overlays and drop-down menus designed mobile-first.

Streamlined content authoring

Drupal 10 introduces several enhancements that streamline the process of creating and authoring content for content editors and site builders.

The new Layout Builder allows drag-and-drop page building, allowing content editors to quickly rearrange page elements visually without needing developer help. This makes experimenting with different layouts much faster and intuitive.

The backend admin interface has also been completely overhauled in Drupal 10 with an improved UX that focuses on simplifying workflows for content creators. The improved information architecture and intuitive placement of options helps editors work more efficiently.

Out of the box WYSIWYG enhancements provide a polished authoring experience right away without extensive configuration. At the same time, Drupal still offers flexibility and extensibility in integrating third-party editors. The CKEditor editor is now the default.

Authors can also quickly update content blocks inline without having to navigate to a separate edit page. This allows for rapid previewing and iteration of content changes.

The new unified Media module also offers a simplified interface for finding, managing, inserting and displaying different types of media like images, videos, and embedded content. The streamlined workflow saves authors time.

Together these improvements help content creators and site builders focus on producing great content quickly and efficiently instead of technical hurdles. The enhanced authoring experience in Drupal 10 reduces friction.