If your site is already built on Drupal, or you’re considering the platform for your website, you’ve probably thought about what type of maintenance and support you’ll need to keep it up-to-date.
Whether it’s top-of-mind already, or you’re still looking for more information, this guide will help you understand why maintenance and support is an important part of your Drupal website strategy.
Table of contents
- Why is Drupal maintenance important?
- Essential Drupal maintenance and support tasks
- Kanopi: The best Drupal website maintenance and support service
Why is Drupal Maintenance Important?
After a site’s been built, it still requires upkeep to ensure it’s operating effectively and meeting your company objectives. Many businesses still take a “set it and forget it” approach when it comes to their sites, leaving them with outdated content, version issues, and vulnerable to security threats.
Whether you’re on D7 and you’re thinking about end-of-life planning, or you’ve moved to a newer Drupal version already, it’s important to factor in Drupal maintenance and support to ensure you’re keeping your site healthy.
“A continuous improvement approach is best for sustaining your website for the long-term.”
Anne Stefanyk, Kanopi CEO/Founder
By investing in Drupal maintenance and support you’re ensuring your site is successful in several areas, including:
- Protecting your sensitive information from security threats
- Ensuring compatibility with connected and underlying technologies
- Improving performance of your site
- Ensuring your website stays SEO optimized
- Keeping your website updated with current information and reflecting any time-sensitive changes
Essential Drupal Maintenance and Support Tasks
To ensure you have a website that functions optimally, you need to continuously update it. All Drupal websites are made up of a main Drupal core and various modules that require occasional updates. If you don’t run these updates and patches as they come, your website can be vulnerable to security threats and may have bugs and other malfunctions. It’s important to mention, this is not a Drupal-only requirement. All website platforms have similar needs when it comes to long-term maintenance.
Tasks that are key to a good Drupal maintenance plan include:
- Consistent site backups
- Drupal core updates
- Up-to-date themes and modules
- Optimized caching
- Optimized database
- Security updates
- Module, theme, and library version updates
- Third-party integration support
- Regression testing
- Bug resolution
- Infrastructure maintenance
- Uptime monitoring and abnormality alerts
- Emergency support
- Minor feature improvements
Some companies opt to take on their Drupal maintenance and support in-house, but it can be a time consuming process if your team lacks the skill set required to keep it working optimally. Even if you have the expertise internally, you may want to explore the option of outsourcing your Drupal maintenance and support to an agency to off load the work and allow your teams to focus on other priorities.
Shameless plug: We love Drupal at Kanopi! And, we love creating custom Drupal website maintenance and support plans for our clients.
Kanopi: The Best Drupal Website Maintenance and Support Service
By choosing an agency to manage your Drupal website maintenance and support, you gain a dedicated team with years of expertise. At Kanopi, we work with you closely to genuinely understand your business needs and create a plan to support it.
We do the ongoing work to stay updated with the latest industry trends and Drupal updates so we can be your trusted partner in the process. Kanopi also takes a continuous improvement and growth-driven approach with incremental improvements like navigation strategy and SEO fixes, so your site is always improving.
Features of Kanopi’s Drupal Maintenance Service
Here are some of our top Drupal maintenance and support services:
- Module and plugin updates
- Bug fixes and security patches
- Development modifications
- Updating content types/views
- Third-party integrations
- CSS/HTML changes
- Commerce updates
- Performance enhancements
- Web accessibility optimization
- Technical SEO optimization
When you work with us, we also go way beyond the typical Drupal support and maintenance package. We provide creative support and ‘design on demand’, working with you on anything from user research, persona development, and conversion optimization to wireframing, mood boards, and style guides.
We’re here to help with your Drupal maintenance and support. Reach out to get started!
