If you've been told that moving your website from Drupal 7 to the current version is more complicated than a normal update, that's true — and it's worth understanding why before you start the project.
If your website runs on Drupal 7, here's the short version: that version of the software stopped being supported in January 2025. No more security fixes, no more safety net.
Drupal 7 first came out in 2011, and it did its job for a remarkably long time — right up until it stopped being supported in January 2025.
"Updating Drupal core" sounds like a small task, and for a patch release, it usually is. But it's also the step where a rushed process can take a production site down for an afternoon.
If you've ever started a Drupal major version upgrade only to get blindsided by a pile of deprecated code halfway through, the Upgrade Status module is the tool that's supposed to stop that from happening.