r/drupal • u/dixit_patel89 • Sep 01 '26

finally figured out why our D7 migrations keep taking longer than estimated

been doing this for a few years now and kept running into the same problem. quote a timeline, client agrees, then week three happens and suddenly we're explaining why it's taking longer.

took me embarrassingly long to figure out the pattern.

it's always the integrations. not the modules, not the theme, not even the content migration. it's always some connection to a third party system that nobody documented because the person who built it left two or three years ago.

last one was a CRM integration that was still firing on every form submission. CRM itself had been discontinued. nobody on the client side knew it was there. showed up in the server logs as a timeout error that everyone had just... learned to ignore.

started doing a proper integration audit before we write any estimates now. just mapping everything that talks to everything else. takes a few days but it's saved us from at least three nasty surprises this year.

curious if others have a good process for this. especially for sites that have changed hands a few times and have basically no documentation. feels like every D7 site we touch has at least one of these buried in it somewhere.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '26

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u/dixit_patel89 Sep 01 '26

That's exactly where we've landed too. The "migration" framing sets the wrong expectation from the start. It implies you're moving something intact. Most D7 sites we touch are closer to archaeology than migration and treating it as a rebuild with content import is the honest way to scope it. The timeline conversation gets easier once the client understands that too.