Website maintenance and support services for Drupal publishing sites
Many businesses take advantage of website maintenance and support to keep their sites working smoothly.
As a Drupal website support team, Drudesk knows that media and publishing websites on Drupal are a large segment of customers who need support. Read on to find out how they benefit from website maintenance and support services, as well as from our very affordable pricing strategies.
Why media and publishing website owners choose Drupal
The popularity of Drupal in the media industry is well known. Especially in recent years, with the arrival of Drupal 8, Drupal has a strong focus on improving the editorial experiences, This is listed among Drupal 8’s benefits for business. So here are a few reasons why Drupal 8 is the best choice for media websites:
- enhanced content editing experiences with the modern CKEditor to easily create, edit, and delete content
- the ability to shape your content publishing toolbar with exactly the options you need
- additional ease of editing with the Quick Edit feature that works directly on the website pages and allows you to quickly fix a typo without going to the admin dashboard
- advanced media handling options in Drupal 8 that allow editors and users to save multimedia in the media library and quickly embed it into the content to make it richer
- flexible editorial workflows on publishing websites thanks to new modules like the Content Moderation and the Workflows
- powerful options to make your website multilingual, which is often needed for media and publishing sites
- a mobile-first approach to ensure the best reading experiences for all users who browse publishing websites from mobile devices
- an API-first approach to share your content feeds to other sites or apps
- easy integration with social media (share buttons, icons, feeds, counters, etc.)
- and much more
Why media & publishing website owners on Drupal need maintenance and support
Maintenance and support includes a wide array of services — bug fixes, improvements, audit, updates, and more. These may be occasional help with Drupal website maintenance tasks (both trivial or complicated), or ongoing long-term website maintenance contracts.
Our Drupal support and maintenance team offers affordable prices for all kinds of services. The experience of our devs allow them to quickly identify the problem and deliver a solution. Professional support needs to be quick, where an experienced eye of a developer sees what needs to be done after having dealt with a variety of issues.
When it comes to Drupal publishing sites in particular, the key aim of the maintenance services is to uncover their true capabilities. Here is which services prove to be the most beneficial:
Drupal security updates
Drupal is a very secure CMS, largely due to security updates regularly created by the Drupal Security team in answer to newly discovered vulnerabilities. Sometimes, there are highly critical releases, like the two that happened in the spring of 2018, which resolved the threats of “remote code execution” that got the name “Drupalgeddon 2.”
Applying the security patches on your website increases your safety and peace. They are not applied automatically, so it’s best to hire a support and maintenance team for these tasks. In ong-term maintenance, our experts watch out for updates like this and tell you about them based on the regular update notifications.
Recently, there was an announcement about the launch of the automatic website updates feature, currently focused on the Drupal core security updates. This feature is very promising, but while it is being polished to perfection, we can take care of security updates for your publishing site.
Core and module updates and upgrades
Keeping your website up-to-date is very important in terms of new functionality and performance. That’s why core and module updates are one of our most popular services. This includes:
- upgrades between the major versions (like from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8)
- updates between the minor versions (like from Drupal 8.7 to Drupal 8.8)
When it comes to media or publishing websites, they especially need to keep to Drupal 8’s latest versions in order to fully use Drupal 8’s capabilities, because the editorial “part” improves at a rapid speed and offers new features. The update procedure can be safely entrusted to our Drupal support and maintenance team.
Plenty of things that we mentioned in the part about “Why media and publishing website owners choose Drupal 8” were not originally included into the Drupal 8.0 but added much later. For example, the Media Library arrived in Drupal 8.6, introduced a new user-friendly media selection interface for D8.7, and got a WYSIWYG integration with a handy icon to add media to content in D8.8 only. You will be surprised to discover how many features you could be missing out on without Drupal 8 updates.
In addition to the desire to be fully-featured, media and publishing websites ask for updates to the latest D8 version because it is one of the conditions to quickly move to Drupal 9.
Getting ready for Drupal 9
Helping sites get ready for Drupal 9 is one of our support and maintenance team’s favorite tasks. Drupal 9 is coming in June of 2020, and Drupal 8 websites should have an instant upgrade this time. But not all of them will — only those that follow the two conditions:
- their code is cleaned up from deprecated code APIs and functions
- they are using the latest version of the Drupal 8 core and modules
Our maintenance team is ready to give a comprehensive check and clean-up from deprecated code using tools like Drupal-check, Upgrade Status, Rector, and more.
Consultations for your editorial team
Our support and maintenance experts can also advise your editorial team on how to best use Drupal’s publishing capabilities. If there are some specifics of the setup on your website (for example, a video field embedded into your article content type), they will give useful instructions on how to use it quickly and efficiently. Especially if your editors are new to Drupal, this could come in handy.
Performance improvement
Good speed is a sure way to increase website traffic on media and publishing websites. Users want to enjoy their reading experiences without losing patience because of slow pages.
There can be different reasons why a Drupal site slows down, but our experts can discover them quickly. They will help your publishing website gather speed by using the relevant techniques. Among them are Drupal 8 image optimization, the right caching strategies, bandwidth optimization, media lazy loading, and many more.
Fixes for bugs and issues
Something doesn’t work as expected on your publishing site? This can be anything: broken content images or links, no chance to post comments under the content, problems with contact form field validation, doubled news headlines, browser incompatibility, and so on.
Eliminating all the bugs is the first step to your publishing website reader's loyalty. Some bugs may have a very trivial reason behind them, some may be more complicated, with their underlying reason in an unexpected place. Our developers have a keen eye for detail and extensive experience with all sorts of bugs, so they are able to identify the reasons very quickly and never waste your time and money.
Website redesign
Another popular service with our support and maintenance team is website redesign. It’s never too late to change your design in accordance with your new ideas and business requirements. This may range from slight changes to a complete overhaul.
We have UX designers on the team who know the best practices for making websites user-friendly. They will create the new look and feel of your Drupal website and make sure every button, link, and layout block leads your customer on its journey to a conversion.
New functionality creation
You have a website in the sphere of media and publishing, but something may be missing on it. Maybe you have a new idea of what else it could do.
Would you like to integrate your site with social media? Maybe your aim is to create a forum? Is your goal to go multilingual? Or is it something more challenging like creating a mobile app based on Drupal that will display your news feed to a wider audience? Everything is possible — we can add it at any time!
Our Drupal support and maintenance team will develop these new features at very reasonable prices. Drupal 8 has plenty of capabilities in site building with minimum coding to save the customer’s budget. This is especially true for non-profit publishing websites that need to bring their message across but are limited in expenses. They are often run by volunteers and supported by donations, and we understand this fact.
When website maintenance and support services for Drupal 8 publishing sites get a request for a new functionality, our team immediately separates the core and contrib part from the custom part. The resulting speed, efficiency, and experience is the key to truly affordable services where every hour can provide more value to you.
Enjoy the reasonable cost for website maintenance!
Ready to provide your Drupal publishing website with the care it deserves? You can be sure your wallet will be happy as well! Our strategy and commitment is to make Drupal website maintenance services quick and inexpensive. The quality of our work will also be supported with a website maintenance and support services agreement.
Talk to us and choose your maintenance plan or order a one-time task that will improve your Drupal publishing website. Our Drupal support and maintenance team is here to help you.