Drupal 11: New Features, Improvements, and What's Changed

Originally published October 24, 2025.

Welcome, Drupal 11! Released on August 2, 2024, Drupal 11 is a major release for the platform that organizations like NASA, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer rely on. At DrupalCon Portland in 2024, Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert unveiled Drupal Starshot (now Drupal CMS), an initiative to make Drupal approachable for "ambitious site builders" without deep Drupal experience. Drupal 11 lays the technical groundwork for that vision, with three major focus areas:

• More intuitive content management tools
• Improved site builder tools
• Making it easier to upgrade and maintain Drupal applications

Here is a closer look at what this means for the people who build, own, and manage Drupal applications every day. Drupal 11 gives developers, site builders, and content owners more control over building and maintaining their digital experiences.

Is Drupal 11 stable? Yes — Drupal 11.0 launched in August 2024 as the first stable, production-ready release of the 11.x series. Many core modules that were experimental in Drupal 10 — including Single-Directory Components and Workspaces — became fully stable with this release.

Key Differences Between Drupal 10 and 11

Before exploring specific features, here is what separates Drupal 11 from its predecessor:

• Platform requirements — Drupal 11 requires PHP 8.3 for faster performance, Symfony 7 for a modernized framework, and MySQL 8.0 or an equivalent database. These updated dependencies support long-term maintainability.
• Cleaner codebase — Drupal 11 removes all code that was deprecated in Drupal 10, making core smaller, leaner, and faster.
• Stable experimental modules — Single-Directory Components (SDC) and Workspaces have graduated from experimental to stable status. The Recipes API remains experimental in Drupal 11.0, with stable status expected in a later 11.x release.
• Improved developer experience — New APIs, better debugging tools, and streamlined JavaScript handling reduce development friction.

Note: Drupal 10 reaches End of Life on December 9, 2026. Organizations should plan their upgrade strategy now, well ahead of that date.

Improved Administration Backend

Site administrators get several new features in Drupal 11. The classic administration toolbar now renders faster on backend and frontend pages, so key tasks load more quickly. A new option within Views lets you create pages that appear in the administration theme regardless of their path.

Permission management is easier too: a new quick filter helps you find the right permissions faster. A new Announcements Feed module now ships by default with new Drupal installations, keeping site admins up to date on the latest news.

New Navigation Module

Drupal 11 also includes the Navigation module, introduced experimentally in Drupal 10.3 and still experimental in 11.0, which redesigns the classic toolbar from the ground up. It is a left-aligned, collapsible vertical sidebar that makes it easier to navigate a large administration menu. It is also highly customizable: you can configure the included blocks or add other menu blocks.

Single-Directory Components (SDCs) for UI Component Creation

Single-Directory Components, initially developed at drupal.org/project/sdc, are now part of Drupal core itself, not a separate module, and are fully stable. Each component keeps everything it needs in one directory, which makes components easier to find, reuse across the site, and write.

With SDC, frontend developers do not need deep Drupal knowledge to build components — a good fit for teams with mixed technical backgrounds.

Decoupled Navigation Made Easier

Drupal's API system already made it a strong choice for frontend JavaScript applications, but managing navigation in those setups was often cumbersome. Drupal 10.1 addressed this with dedicated endpoints built on the Linkset standard, which Drupal 11 carries forward to simplify navigation between content elements in decoupled scenarios.

A frontend developer can now consume menu data to render navigation instead of hard-coding it. Non-developers can also manage application menus without writing code.

JavaScript Modernization

Modern JavaScript components replace some uses of jQuery UI. Drupal 11 also adds on-the-fly JavaScript file minification, so developers no longer need additional build steps.

This reduces pre-gzipped file size by up to about two-thirds. The process strips comments, whitespace, and extra parentheses. Sites or distributions using contributed JavaScript minification modules should re-evaluate them against core's aggregation and minification, since some may no longer be necessary.

Debugging and Cache Controls

Drupal 11 adds a new option for developers who work with Twig: Twig Development Mode. Enabling it turns on a set of debugging tools for troubleshooting and performance tuning.

Debug mode makes it easier to pinpoint and resolve issues during development. It also removes the need for repetitive cache clears: changes to Twig templates appear immediately, which speeds up iteration.

Developers also get more control over caching with the new Do Not Cache Markup option. This checkbox disables Render Cache, Dynamic Page Cache, and Drupal Page Cache, giving developers a true-to-development view of their work — free of the caching layers that can mask the immediate effect of a change.

Better Authoring With CKEditor 5

CKEditor 5's Code block button also improves in Drupal 11: editors can now configure which specific programming or markup languages it displays, which benefits technical documentation teams and developer-focused sites.

Content Modeling and Management Is Easier

Drupal 11 also revamps the interface for reusing existing fields, making it easier to build consistent content models.

Key content management enhancements include:

• Text format enforcement — Text fields can now enforce a specific text format, which streamlines the experience for content editors.
• Unified revision editing — A single, unified interface for editing entity revisions makes prior versions of content easier to manage, whether they are in content blocks, nodes, or other entity types.
• Floating action bar — A new floating action bar for bulk operation lists lets users launch actions on multiple selected content items quickly.

File and Media Management Improvements

Drupal 11 offers filename sanitization and transliteration settings for file uploads out of the box, including whitespace replacement and lowercasing options.

Media entities now support revision editing as well. The default image styles installed by Drupal core also switch to WebP, which reduces image sizes by roughly 25%–34% — a performance improvement that benefits both site speed and search engine optimization (SEO).

Block Management Is More Flexible

Site builders can create custom blocks directly under Structure in the administrative interface. More granular permissions let you manage blocks by type, and revisions applied to block content can be reviewed and rolled back if needed.

Block management also lets you show or hide blocks based on a page's response status — success, access denied, or not found.

Stable Workspaces to Stage Content Updates

Drupal 11 stabilizes the Workspaces module, which lets users prepare and stage content updates all at once. Content owners can build out an alternate set of updates — for example, publishing results after a sporting event, or rolling out changes across multiple pages at the same time — and review everything together before it goes live.

This capability is valuable for enterprise organizations managing complex content workflows across large teams.

Taxonomy Features

Taxonomy now includes a visual UI for viewing, reverting, and deleting revisions. It is also possible to apply a content moderation workflow to taxonomy terms, which brings governance to your site's classification system.

Composable Site Building With Recipes API

Recipes address limitations in Drupal's previous install profiles and pave the way for more composable site building. Each recipe bundles automated site-building steps that can be combined together, and none of them linger on the site once applied.

Recipes have many practical uses. Say you want to streamline event sign-ups: a recipe can install the right modules and configure them for that use case in one step. This reduces the site-building work involved, since you no longer need to download and configure each module individually.

Drupal 11 still supports install profiles by default. The built-in profiles have also been broken out into component recipes, which point toward the future of composable Drupal site building.

New Access Policy Capabilities

Drupal 10.3 introduced a new access policy API that supports access-granting and access-checking logic that goes beyond permissions and user roles — for example, whether a user has two-factor authentication enabled, or whether they have hit an activity rate limit.

Drupal 11 builds on this: Drupal's existing permissions and role-based access control now run on this API, and custom or contributed projects can add further access policies.

Enhanced Lazy Loading Improves User Experience

Through BigPipe, Drupal lets web browsers fetch additional page information after the initial page loads, which reduces initial load times. As of Drupal 10.1, BigPipe also supports interface previews for delayed content, which reduces page reflows and smooths out the user experience.

Responsive images can be lazy-loaded, and oEmbed content can be configured the same way so it does not hold up the initial page load.

Improved Core Performance

Drupal 11 puts substantial effort into making core smaller and leaner. Contributors have extensively cleaned up and streamlined the codebase, sharpening Drupal's core strengths — including security and performance.

In many places, contributors have rewritten code to be more efficient. All code deprecated in Drupal 10 has now been fully removed, which reduces confusion and redundancy across Drupal's APIs. Running on PHP 8.3 also delivers a meaningful speed improvement.

Gander Performance Testing Framework

Gander, an automated performance testing framework, has been part of Drupal core since 10.2. It monitors performance over time so that regressions are not unknowingly reintroduced with code changes.

Gander performance tests collect key web vitals metrics during the page lifecycle:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB) — Server response speed
• First Contentful Paint (FCP) — Initial rendering speed
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — Main content visibility

How to Upgrade to Drupal 11

Planning a Drupal 11 upgrade? Here is a brief overview of the process:

1. Update to Drupal 10.3 — Make sure your site runs the latest Drupal 10 version before upgrading.
2. Run Upgrade Status — Install the Upgrade Status module to scan for deprecated code and incompatible modules.
3. Update platform requirements — Confirm PHP 8.3, Drush 13, and a compatible database version are available.
4. Remediate deprecated code — Use Drupal Rector to automatically fix custom code issues.
5. Update contributed modules — Confirm all contributed modules are Drupal 11 compatible.
6. Test thoroughly — Run dry runs in development environments before deploying to production.

For detailed guidance, see our Drupal 11 Upgrade Checklist.

Why Upgrade to Drupal 11?

Beyond new features, Drupal 11 delivers business value:

• Performance gains — faster page loads improve the user experience and search engine rankings.
• Reduced maintenance — a cleaner codebase means less technical debt over time.
• Future-ready platform — modern dependencies (Symfony 7, PHP 8.3) support long-term maintainability.
• Enterprise validation — organizations such as NASA, Pfizer, and the Australian Government rely on Drupal for mission-critical applications.

Looking Ahead

Future Drupal 11 releases have more in store. The roadmap includes continued improvements to the authoring experience, expanded Recipes functionality, and further performance optimizations.

Related Resources

• Drupal 11 Preparation Checklist
• Drupal.org documentation

Ready to explore Drupal 11 for your organization? Contact Acquia's Drupal experts to discuss your upgrade strategy or new implementation.