Your Content Management System Matters: Why You Should Consider Drupal 9?

Today’s technology has a key role in sales and marketing. An important example of sales and marketing technology is the content management (CMS) system that powers websites and web applications. A CMS acts as a single source for all website information. Marketing teams use it to publish content, create landing pages and drive more traffic. CMS seamlessly sends leads and inquiries to CRM systems allowing sales teams to instantly engage with new prospects. The right content management system (CMS) is crucial to your organization’s digital success.

Drupal 9

Drupal has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences need. Drupal 9 prioritizes flexibility, functionality, security, and performance by offering more than just a content management system, but a complete digital experience platform (DXP). According to CVE Details, WordPress has reported almost 345 security incidents since 2004 while Drupal has reported much lesser vulnerabilities since its advent in 2002.

The Drupal-Acquia Effect

Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert started a cloud hosting service that has evolved into Acquia’s digital experience platform. Acquia and Drupal operate under the same founding principles, providing the world’s most ambitious brands with technology that allows them to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter.

Mariam Ahman, Senior Director of digital marketing at Acquia, stated that “the flexibility of composable content and composable applications means businesses are no longer as dependent on specialists or developer teams to execute digital transformation, and instead can allow these teams to focus more strongly on managing the overall digital infrastructure. Especially in our new landscape where timelines are condensed and budgets consolidated, launching successful digital experiences requires all hands on deck.”

The Updates

One of the many benefits of open-source systems is the ability to coordinate and constantly improve on the experience. Drupal announced that Drupal 7 is essentially an outdated version and will be completely phased out by November 2022. Without the upgrade, the Drupal community will no longer provide website owners with the improved security, editorial experience and accessibility features of Drupal 9.

What Exactly Are You Getting with Drupal 9?

The upgrade to Drupal 9 is imminent. Here are some of the benefits you will be getting with Drupal 9:

• Better security
• Faster Performance
• More open to integrations
• Multilingual
• Accessible to all audiences
• Streamlined content management interface/User Experience
• Scalable
• No major upgrades to this version

What Does This Mean For You?

This largely depends on your current CMS and your specific business needs.  The process of migrating a website to a new CMS can be extensive and expensive. But by adopting the right processes and tools, your business can streamline and accelerate this task – allowing for more time to dedicate to auditing, testing, and website improvements.

Acquia offers solutions like Acquia Cloud Platform, Acquia Site Studio and Remote IDE to help organizations start building, managing, and optimizing their sites on Drupal 9. Acquia Migrate Accelerate (AMA) provides a migration workspace and migration environment for smaller-scale websites to migrate to Drupal 9 without any of the set-up time required.

With the AMA platform you can:

• Accelerate content mapping by leveraging a common language
• Leverage tested transformation scripts to migrate faster
• Reduce migration risk with extensive reporting
• Optimize & audit your content with detailed content reports
• Build your application with low-code in Acquia Site Studio

If your website is running on Drupal 7 then you need to consider starting the migration process. Drupal 7 was slated to end on November 1, 2022, but the Drupal organization decided to extend its support until November 1, 2023. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that Drupal 7 is a limiting technology, and migration to the next version of Drupal CMS is only a question of time. The sooner your organization will migrate, the sooner your team will be able to access the newest features and functionality such as layout builder.

Depending on your website size, you have the option of working with the AMA platform or a Drupal-authorized website design and development agency to migrate your site. Or, if you are contemplating changing your CMS, then now is the time to start looking into a more efficient, integrated system.

As a Drupal partner agency, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide in partnership with Acquia on how you can seamlessly migrate to Drupal 9 without breaking your site metrics, watch our on-demand webinar.

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