Upgrade to Drupal 9: No coding skills required

Drupal 8 too will be faced out soon. You should upgrade your existing Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 website to Drupal 9 ASAP. This ensures that your Drupal 9 website will continue receiving security updates & new features from the Drupal community.

Drupal 9

Drupal 9 offers many enhancements and new features including, but not limited to:

1. New layout builder
2. WYSIWYG media management system
3. Content workflow tools
4. API first architecture
5. New Admin interface
6. New default theme
7. Uses composer 2
8. PHP 8 ready
9. Easy to upgrade to major future core release i.e., Drupal 10
10. Automatic core updates

Preparation:

1. Make sure your existing Drupal 8 website is running at least 8.8.x core version. If not, update it using this guide: Update to Drupal 8.8
2. Take backup of your existing Drupal 8 codebase & DB
3. Get the latest stable release in Drupal 9 branch.
4. Upgrade your composer to version 2.0.

Process:

1. Remove both composer.json & composer.lock from existing Drupal 8 website.
2. Delete vendors directory.
3. Overwrite your Drupal 8 website codebase with latest Drupal 9.x files. Preserve all the files/directories you created/added.

Validation:

1. Execute composer update
2. Execute drush updb
3. Execute drush cr

Confirmation:

1. Access your upgraded website from the browser and confirm all the features are working as desired.

If you see errors at any stage during the upgrade process, you may need to apply a patch or two for specific contributed/core modules/themes. And this may require some coding skills!😉