Blog
Nobody picks Drupal in 2026. I rebuilt a client’s site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 anyway — and I did it AI-native.
Full redesign. Second language added. Migration across four major versions. One rule: no traditional development workflow. AI only.
Here’s what actually happened.
A real client. A working Drupal 7 site — production, real users, real content. The brief: modernize everything. New design. Add Russian as a second language. Move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 without losing anything.
This is the kind of project most agencies either quote at 2× what the client expects or suggest rewriting in something more “modern.” Drupal 7 to 11 means jumping through Drupal 8, 9, and 10 — four major version architectures. The content model changed. The module ecosystem changed. Most of the old contributed modules either don’t exist anymore or work completely differently.
I gave myself one constraint: build it completely AI-native. No web agency workflow. No manual developing. I gave instructions — Claude executed them.
What this means in practice:
Drupal doesn’t come up when you ask AI what stack to use. Neither does PHP, unless you count “only if you really must.” Both are considered old in an era where everyone’s chasing Next.js and headless everything. I wanted to see if that attitude would show up in the work — if the AI would push back, suggest alternatives, or struggle with the older ecosystem.
It didn’t struggle. Give it Drupal and it figures it out.
The migration path was handled systematically. The AI understood Drupal’s architecture — how entities work, how the theming system changed, how to handle content migration between major versions. It wasn’t guessing. It was working from real knowledge of how Drupal’s systems are structured.
The multilingual setup (adding Russian as a second language to a Drupal site) is notoriously fiddly — interface translation, content translation, URL structure, language detection. The AI handled all of it without needing it broken down into smaller steps.
The design work was the interesting part. The brief was “modern, clean, professional.” I described the direction. AI generated the theme, the layouts, the component structure. Not pixel-perfect from a Figma file — but functional, professional, and close enough to refine in a few rounds.
AI-native translation — for some content, I had the AI translate existing pages rather than waiting on a human translator. It handled idiom and professional terminology better than I expected. For legal content and technical specs, I still reviewed carefully. For general website copy, it was production-ready.
I expected AI to occasionally suggest “wouldn’t it be easier in Next.js?” — especially for the multilingual setup, which is simpler in headless architectures.
It didn’t. It pitched the solution that matched the constraint. Drupal, Drupal, Drupal. No second-guessing the choice. Just execution.
This surprised me. And it raised something worth saying: AI tools have absorbed a lot of developer opinion about “modern” stacks. But when given a clear constraint, they set that opinion aside and work within the reality you’ve defined.
If you’re running a Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 site (both end-of-life), migration feels expensive and risky. The traditional path involves agencies quoting large projects, long timelines, and often a suggestion to abandon Drupal entirely.
The AI-native approach changes the math. The planning, the code, the content migration, the theme work — all of it can be AI-executed with a smaller team directing the work. The project scope is the same. The cost and timeline are not.
Drupal performance optimization and migration is one of our specialties. We’ve consistently achieved 90+ PageSpeed mobile scores on Drupal sites — something that takes real understanding of the stack, not just running a checklist. And we bring the same AI-native approach to every project.
If you’re sitting on an aging Drupal site and don’t know whether to migrate or rebuild, get in touch. We can be specific about what makes sense for your situation.
This is a real project. The client is based in Eastern Europe. The site is live.
ilf.studio — AI-native web studio, Gdansk, Poland.