We have three client sites still on Drupal 9. End of life is coming up and I need to plan the upgrade path. Has anyone gone through the 9 to 11 jump? The official docs make it sound straightforward but I have been doing this long enough to know better.
Mainly worried about contrib module compatibility and whether the new recipes system is production-ready.
Did the 9 to 10 hop on a mid-size site last year. The upgrade itself was fine - rector handled most of the deprecated code. The real pain was three contrib modules that hadnt been updated yet. We ended up patching two of them ourselves and replacing the third.
I would check your module list against the D11 compatibility tracker before committing to a timeline.
The 9 to 11 path is actually 9 → 10 → 11 unless you want to skip 10 entirely which is possible but riskier. I would recommend the stepping stone approach.
Recipes are solid for new sites but I would not retrofit them into an existing config setup mid-migration. Too many moving parts. Do the upgrade first, adopt recipes on the next project.
In enterprise we budget three to four months for major Drupal upgrades. The core upgrade is usually the easy part. It is the custom modules, integrations, and QA cycles that eat the timeline.
If you have clean upgrade paths on your contrib modules, two months is realistic for a mid-complexity site.
Thanks all. @phpwizard stepping stone approach makes sense, I will go 9 to 10 first. Already checked the compatibility tracker and we are mostly clear except for one custom paragraphs setup that will need rework.