Move to Drupal 9 and Exceed CXpectations

As we move toward 2021 and continue to reckon with COVID-19, digital-first companies need to level up their plan to meet shifting customer needs. Drupal 9 can help.
 

There isn't a lot anyone can say with absolute certainty right now. But we can be certain about one detail... 

Customers aren’t the same as they were six months ago.

In just a few months, COVID-19 rapidly accelerated dependence on digital and your customers’ expectations evolved far beyond anything ever imagined. As we move into a new year where COVID-19 will continue to affect how we live and work, it’s becoming clear that your customers’ evolved preferences are here to stay. Digitally-enabled companies that were ready to pivot have not only sustained, but they've also thrived. For example, Uber Eats took advantage of the explosive growth in home food delivery by expanding to delivering groceries and adding contactless delivery options to make customers feel safe. The success of their approach hinged not only on quick changes to their strategy but, perhaps even more crucially, on their tech capabilities to actually make them happen. 

Your tech platforms and ability to be agile are the backbone of digital customer experience. Without strategic and mindful management, you're putting customer loyalty at risk. 

Stay on older versions of Drupal at your own risk

Your CMS impacts agility and effectiveness across all the internal teams who touch it. It’s a crucial cog in your tech stack that enables frictionless customer experience. If you’re not planning to move to Drupal 9, you’re putting fundamental aspects of your business at risk.

Digital Strategy and User Experience

Drupal is designed to put content, commerce, and community first in its solutions. The digital platforms that Drupal supports are the cornerstones of digital transformation and advancement for the brands that use it. They enable modern, secure websites and content strategies that add value through optimized structures and responsive design. 

Agility and Scalability

Drupal 9’s inherently flexible design makes it naturally scalable and easy to work with, helping teams deliver against critical outcomes like lead gen, brand reputation, conversion, sales, and more. 

Accessibility

The Drupal community is dedicated to accessibility. They’ve committed that all core features will meet WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements, and relevant Drupal modules are built to support semantic markup. 

Security

Drupal’s justifiably proud of it’s robust and longer-term track record in security. Their organized process investigates, verifies, and publishes possible security problems for analysis and solution integration within the open-source community. 

SEO

Running on a sophisticated core, despite the volume of code, Drupal 9 reduces load time, significantly improving SEO, and delivering a seamless experience.
 

Drupal 9 and its business benefits

Several upgraded features and functionalities make Drupal 9 stand out.
 

Headless Support

Drupal 9 can be used as a CMS only – integrating with another tech to display pages to the end-user. You can tie as many front-end APIs to Drupal as you want – and customize an overall structure that works the best for your business and the type of customer experience you want to create. 

Multilingual and Multimedia

Customers’ demand engaging and personalized experiences – delivery of meaningful content is critical. With multimedia capabilities now in the core Drupal offering, capabilities to add video, audio, dynamic images, and more are baked right in. Simultaneously, multilingual support makes it simpler to run content programs for the growing number of businesses targeting customers across the globe who speak different languages.

Structured Content

In Drupal 7, it was necessary to build specific pages with set layouts. Drupal 8 laid the foundation for the transition to an atomic design approach. In Drupal 9, devs can build layouts and templates with atomic design components that give businesses the power to create the types of pages they want and evolve them afterward. COVID-19 is an excellent example of how this can be extremely beneficial. We had clients ready to roll and use that toolkit to build new pages by assembling and re-arranging the parts within existing themes. These quick, rapid prototype pages are an excellent way for marketing and content teams to be able to generate content quickly.

Content Workflows

From moderation to scheduling to deployment, Drupal 9 makes it easy to create and approve drafts in a secure editorial environment before moving them to QA or production. Isolated environments are particularly crucial for companies in regulated industries where an accidental exposure of sensitive content could cause fines and harm your reputation. At the same time, following lengthy approvals and edits, you don’t want to have to completely re-create content for production and leave yourself vulnerable to small human errors. 
 

Our experts can help you plan for 2021 and beyond

The launch of Drupal 9 marks the dawn of a new era for one of the world’s most relied upon CMSs. While it brings unique challenges for businesses needing to upgrade, when approached thoughtfully, it’s also an incredible opportunity for your business to push their digital-first, customer-centric strategy even further. Our team of Drupal experts has successfully consulted with some of the world’s leading brands. 

If you're looking for insights on the right questions to ask while evaluating your CMS, download your copy of our white paper Migrate & Exceed CXpections. If you need to talk to an expert, contact us, we'd love to hear from you.