u/dixit_patel89

We've audited a lot of Drupal 7 sites this year.

Same things keep showing up.

Modules nobody uses but nobody removed either. They just sit there. Unmaintained. Invisible until they're not.

Integrations the original developer built in 2016 and never wrote down. Current team has no idea what connects to what. We've had to reverse-engineer CRM connections from database logs because there was no other record they existed.

Custom themes nobody wants to touch. PHPTemplate, built when the site launched, last modified when someone added a banner in 2020. The institutional knowledge of how it works left with whoever built it.

PageSpeed scores under 40 on mobile. Not because the hosting is bad. Because nobody has looked at performance since the site went live.

And no process for security advisories. Drupal published 30 in July 2026 alone. Most of these teams knew about zero of them.

The one thing the better-maintained sites have in common: someone actually runs Upgrade Status and does something with what it finds. That's it. Not complicated.

Curious what others are seeing out there. Same patterns or different?

had a client last month whose site went from like 2s to 9s load time over the past couple years. support kept telling them enable caching and it'll be fine. it wasn't.

spent a day actually digging instead of just throwing cache at it and found the real problems -

images were like 5mb+ per page, nobody ever compressed them. 23 modules installed that literally weren't being used anywhere on the site. hosting was still running an old php version, not really set up right for D11. and no cdn, so every single asset was hitting the origin server directly

fixed all of it over about a week, didn't even touch caching config in the end. once the actual bloat was gone the default caching handled everything fine

not the first time i've seen this either, feels like half the "why is my site slow" posts jump straight to caching or hosting when its actually just years of stuff nobody cleaned up

what do you guys usually check first when someone says their drupal site is slow

Been coming across a surprising number of Drupal 7 sites still live this year, even with EOL long behind us.

Curious what's actually holding people back is it cost of migration, custom modules with no clean upgrade path, or just "it still works, why touch it"?

Also curious if anyone's done a D7 → D10/11 migration recently - what ended up being the most painful part?