End of Life (EOL) Meaning

If you are currently on Drupal 7, you may ask what this means for you. Firstly, the End of Life of this version of the Drupal CMS means that if you are still using D7 after November 1, 2023, you will not be getting community-based and security updates. The Drupal community officially stops supporting D7 after the said date. Therefore, you are bound to be faced with threats that frustrate your efforts to meet the needs of your customers if you’re still using D7 by then.

The EOL of D7 doesn’t mean that it will cease to exist altogether. As explained, it means that it will stop getting official support from the Drupal community and the focus will be shifted to the newer version made. This is bound to affect the maintenance of your website.

Is upgrading to Drupal 9 a difficult task?

Because Drupal 9 is a huge upgrade, the migration process is rather difficult. It necessitates a lengthy process, much research, and specialized knowledge.
Nevertheless, D9 has a ton of features integrated into its core that make it appealing.

To make the upgrading process easier, you can migrate to Drupal 8 first, then to Drupal 9. However, Drupal 8 reached the end of its life cycle in 2021. Because of the large number of sites currently using Drupal 7, the Drupal community agreed to extend the deadline for Drupal 7. That being said, migrating to Drupal 8 before 9 is not necessary. Drupal 9 is mainly a continuation of D8 features and it still maintains backward compatibility.

As mentioned above, this is a major upgrade. Drupal’s underlying technology and architecture were significantly upgraded to produce a more powerful and future-proof platform.

This opens up tremendous opportunities for both businesses and their end-users, but it does not necessitate a major investment of time and resources. New technologies and processes must be learned, modules and themes must be rebuilt, the material must be audited, and objectives must be redefined.

The good thing is, this will only happen once. Drupal’s approach to the version releases was redesigned in tandem with its architecture. Upgrading to a new major version in the future will be more like keeping up with minor updates, and it will not necessitate a substantial change.

Benefit/features of Drupal 9 when compared to 7

For developers and editors, Drupal 9 is extremely similar to Drupal 8.9 except for deprecated code. Drupal 9 includes several features that will be updated twice a year to allow businesses to keep up with the market.

• Drupal 9 provides Backward compatibility, which means it can work with CMS versions 8 and higher. It will be able to access data, configurations, and modules generated on the same website as Drupal 8, preserving the performance of the system. Drupal 10 will also be completely compatible with Drupal 9 and so on, in a similar way.

• With Drupal 9, you won’t have to deal with a million configurations because media handling is included in the core. Furthermore, the media library allows you to manage and reuse media like a pro.

• Faster and better performance is guaranteed with Drupal 9. Dries Buyteart, the Drupal founder, recently stated that upgrades from Drupal 9.1 forward will allow for faster and improved website performance. D9 also offers superior scalability and speed, as well as faster page loading, thanks to in-built Bigpipe support.

• Drupal 9 has also done a step further in its support for presenting responsive pictures that are tailored for different user devices. Responsive photos transmit less data than fluid full-size images because they load the smallest device-size image first and then gradually improve the quality. As a result, your Drupal 9 sites’ pages will be better load optimized.

• Drupal 9 features a well-structured codebase. In Drupal 8, the use of deprecated codes has been discontinued. Hence, Drupal 9 will ensure that the drupal environment no longer supports the deprecated code. The purpose is to make D8 modules compatible with D9 by making it a simpler and cleaner version.

Switching to another CMS

It is expected that upgrading from Drupal 7 to 9 will be a major project. Switching platforms totally, on the other hand, might be more costly and disruptive, but can be the best approach and a painless process if handled by a professional website design agency in Nigeria.

If you leave Drupal, you will have to rebuild your website’s architecture, capabilities, and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) features, as well as its integration. Implementing new technology and product ecosystems come at a price. This begs the question, are you willing to pay the price? Would you rather bear the cost of switching platforms completely or accept the challenge of upgrading to Drupal 9?

More importantly, by switching to a CMS platform like WordPress, you will also benefit from similar advantages that Drupal has to offer, which are flexibility and security, accessibility and content editor experience improvements, and data portability.

Before we start with the tips, it would be good for you to understand what a domain name is.

So What is a Domain Name?

A domain name is the given name to a website on the Internet. It is usually made of letters, but sometimes, numbers and symbols are combined with letters to form a domain name. Before you can use a domain name for your business website, you have to buy it from a domain name registrar. Also, two persons or businesses cannot own the same domain name at the same time.

The motive behind the use of domain names to name websites is to facilitate easy remembrance of websites names by humans. At the operational level of websites, information transfer between the browsers and the web servers is through numerical IP addresses.

In essence, domain names are the human-friendly version of numerical web IP addresses.

Now let’s go through the tips on how to choose a domain name for your business website in Nigeria.

1. Go for “.com” domain extension: While we now have lots of domain extensions such as “.com.ng,” “.org,” “.shop,” “.biz” , it is advisable you should stick with .com domain extension. This is because .com is the most popular top-level domain; when people type a domain name in their browser, they only want to end it with .com as that’s what they are most familiar with.

Therefore, going with domain extensions like “.com.ng,” “.ng,” or “.biz” may not be helpful to your business.

Besides lots of people now browse using their phones, and the auto-complete domain extension provided in most smartphone browsers, after typing the domain name, is .com. If your business website ends in “.com.ng” or “.ng,” you are making these people do extract typing. Don’t forget we are all lazy.

2. Make it stand out: An outstanding domain name is catchy, unique, and memorable. To make your domain name stand out, you should check out the domain names of competitors in your industry, and think of how to make yours different from theirs.

Researching your competitors’ domain names would also save you from picking a domain name close to your competitors’, which saves you from a possible allegation of misbranding and trying to use your competitors’ trademark name.

4. Don’t make it too long: The maximum allowed characters for a domain name is 253 characters – but of course, you don’t want to use all the characters. The recommended number of characters for a domain name is 15. Shorter domain names are easy to remember and reduce the possibility of people making typo errors while typing your domain name into the address bar.
5. Make it easy to spell and easy to pronounce: Domain names that are easy to spell and pronounce are easy to remember. So when choosing a domain name for your business, you should make it simple and pronounceable.

Also, you should avoid the use of symbols (such as hyphens, underscores, etc.) and numbers in your domain name.

People are comfortable with domain names written all together, without symbols or numbers separating the letters or words forming the domain name. For example, people are more comfortable with “www.topyougo.com” than “www.top-you-go.com”.

Making your business domain name easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and free of symbols and numbers would make people easily remember it.

5. Add keywords: Although search engines would use the meta-description of your website to know what the website is all about, adding keywords to your domain name would make search engines understand your website In a similar vein, if you run a local business, adding the city or town where you operate to your domain name would make people instantly know your business is in their location.

For example, a domain name like www.pizzalagos.com tells people that the business specialises in pizza and serves people that reside in Lagos.

6. Consider buying mistyped domain name and other domain extensions: People are likely to mistype your domain name or use a different domain extension with your domain name; to prevent losing traffic from this, you should consider buying the possible mistyped domain names and extensions of your website.

Using the www.pizzalagos.com example, you can buy mistyped variation and domain extension like www.pizalagos.com (one Z is missing from PIZZA) and www.pizzalagos.com.ng. After buying the mistyped variations and the other domain extensions, you can then 301 redirect them to your main website, and you would never lose traffic from mistyped domain names and extensions again.

Now that you have the tips on how to choose a domain name for your business website, the next thing is brainstorming on the perfect name. You then need to hire a good web designer that would translate your business philosophy into a stunning website.

If you need help in coming up with a good domain name and designing and hosting your website, don’t hesitate to talk to our expert.