Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
Complete the following steps to prepare your site for upgrading:
- Do one of the following:
- Drupal 6 and earlier: Login as USER 1, the root user, the very first account created when Drupal was installed. If you cannot login as the root user, you will need to modify the update.php script once you load the new files for your site.
- Drupal 7: Log in with any user account that has the "administer software updates" permission enabled
- If you are upgrading a Live Site switch the site to Offline mode :
(Drupal 4.7) administer >>settings or /admin/settings/site-maintenance
(Drupal 5.x) Administer >> Site configuration >> Site maintenance
All anonymous traffic will be redirected to an offline warning page while your site is in offline mode - Switch your theme back to the default theme ('BlueMarine' in 4.7 and lower, 'Garland' in 5.x and 6.x):
(Drupal 4.7) administer >> themes
(Drupal 5.x) Administer >> Site building >> Themes or /admin/build/themes
Uncheck the non-default themes, so that they are not enabled. - Turn off (but do not uninstall) all modules that are not core modules:
Be sure to keep a record of which non-core modules you are using (you can print the modules page or use Site Documentation module for 5x and up). You will get updated versions and re-enable these later.
(Drupal 4.7) administer >> modules or /admin/modules
(Drupal 5.x) Administer >> Site building >> Modules or /admin/build/modules - Make sure that you can still navigate around your site; if you have broken your navigation menu by disabling a module, you can re-enable the module at yoursite.com/admin/build/modules until you can get the site working without that module.