Drupal 7 reached end of life on January 5, 2025, and Magento 1 in 2020. WordPress 7.0 now requires PHP 7.4, which itself has been end-of-life since 2022. How to tell which upgrade path is realistic (in place, rebuild, or replace), and how to host the result on AWS without inheriting the same problem.
Marketing sites and online stores are often the oldest software a company runs in public. They were built by an agency years ago, they work, and nobody inside the company owns them. They are also some of the most attacked software on the internet.
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Upgrade in place when the platform supports it (WordPress, Drupal 10 to 11) and the theme and plugins are maintained.
Rebuild when the jump is a different architecture (Drupal 7 to 11, Magento 1 to 2). Treat it as a new site with migrated content, not an upgrade.
Replace when the site is mostly pages and a contact form. A static site or a hosted CMS removes the server, the PHP version and the patching entirely.
Static or prerendered sites on S3 and CloudFront have nothing to patch on the server side. This site runs that way.
Dynamic CMSs in containers on ECS, with the PHP version pinned in a Dockerfile that is rebuilt and redeployed monthly.
A WAF in front of anything with a login page, with rate limits on login and XML-RPC endpoints.
An owner, named, with a calendar reminder to review versions every quarter.
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