Why Drupal Support and Maintenance Is Crucial for Drupal Powered Projects
A few years ago, you could build a static website, publish content, display images, and leave it unattended for an entire year. However, in today's riskier situation, you can take the lineup of features and functionalities seriously. As a result, your company's reputation, market position, and operations are all at risk around the clock. Furthermore, developing a website, Web app, or e-commerce platform is only the first step in your digital journey. You must update your Drupal project to remain an active and operational entity. In addition, you must have a dedicated Drupal support and maintenance partner for your platform to work consistently.
Drupal is renowned for its security and high standards; making the most of it requires proper upkeep. But regardless of the platform, your website gains value with a support and maintenance plan. Drupal-powered projects become increasingly crucial as Drupal-powered projects become more prominent. It will keep your site running and help avoid data loss and other issues.
This blog will explain why having a Drupal maintenance plan is essential, what is included in support and maintenance services, and how to choose the best team to assist you.
Why is Drupal Support and Maintenance Beneficial?
Your team cannot be available everywhere to provide immediate assistance in the case of a site failure. Second, Drupal site maintenance depends only on its requirements. Support and maintenance initiatives can be custom-curated based on your Drupal website's functionality, version, and scale.
Let's explore a few key factors:
Security is a crucial component of performance. Drupal is undoubtedly one of the most secure CMSs available right now, but that also involves regular security upgrades. To prevent data breaches and cyberattacks, you must routinely update your Drupal website with security patches & upgrades. Updates are frequently released to fix and patch newly discovered vulnerabilities that could affect the security of your website. Please address these updates immediately once they are identified to prevent any breaches or potential problems. Ignoring these changes could harm the security of your website, data, and customer data.
Your website is protected from the most severe hacks by having a team ready and looking for high-alert fixes. Another thing to consider is that upgrading to Drupal 9 now if you're still using Drupal 6/7/8, will allow you to benefit from all of Drupal's features while ensuring the security of your website.
Website Glitches Require Immediate Attention
Your site's performance could decrease as technology becomes more complex. Ignoring even the most minor bug could cost you a customer or result in more severe issues down the road. A 404 error can be triggered anywhere. Even though 404 error pages don't significantly harm your SEO, if your users are frequently directed to broken pages, this might negatively impact their user experience. Not simply broken pages but also malfunctioning buttons, forms, and hyperlinks make browsing difficult. So a dedicated team can run UAT (User Acceptance Testing) to find and fix the bugs on time.
Applications From Third Parties and Broken Features: Keep Your Website Operational
One of the significant benefits of having a Drupal site is the ability to interface with external applications. For monitoring and developing your business, applications like Google Analytics, Salesforce, MailChimp, and numerous SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools are essential. In addition, an API (application programming interface) is required for third parties to communicate with and operate with Drupal.
The functionalities on websites that use these services may become broken due to changes made to how they are accessed over time. An upgrade of the module supplying those features might be required if you discover that some of their functions have failed. Our Drupal developers can evaluate such problems and make the needed changes to get you back in service.
SEO Optimization
It requires effort and time to increase your organic search engine visibility and improve your SEO ranking. With changing markets and customer expectations, search engine rules and algorithms are constantly changing. However, you can utilize Drupal's excellent SEO tools to increase your site's rank and overall visibility for users and search engines.
A wide range of tools and modules in Drupal can aid in SEO optimization. However, your website needs ongoing Drupal SEO maintenance to see better outcomes. In addition, you need someone to perform SEO because it's about connecting with the market.
Maintaining the Agility
Every business owner sees their business as a sapling that they want to see growth every day. Businesses must adapt and scale up proactively to achieve such results. You require quick content updates and improved functionality to process data swiftly and change your offerings in response to user behavior. Although technological know-how is optional, it must integrate new features and improvements.
You'll need some technical expertise for the new features and enhancements that can boost your user experience and customer journey. It is more practical, cost-effective, and time-saving to outsource your Drupal site maintenance to a skilled technical partner. They will continuously work on your Drupal project, keeping you free to focus entirely on your business objectives. In addition, user behavior could be more consistent; thus, your website needs to remain updated and align with your customers' requirements and the industry's goals.
Unexpected Interruptions Might Harm Your Brand's Reputation
Imagine that you are about to complete a necessary purchase using an app when the website crashes and is unavailable for the next 15 minutes. Would you do business with the company or website again? Of course, unexpected situations like website maintenance, feature failures, server disruptions, etc., can be avoided. But, again, consistent support and maintenance are essential to maintaining reliability. You can eliminate these uncertain breakdowns by taking proactive measures and having resources work meticulously on your Drupal project. It allows your company to plan outages, and you can even notify users in advance by email or push notification.
Minimize Errors and Defects to Save Time & Money
You will save more time and money by performing website maintenance regularly. Technical debt (errors and defects) results from the repeated code changes and revisions that Drupal modules undergo over time. Periodic updates assist in controlling overall costs and enable more frequent code changes. We recommend at least quarterly updates. The longer it takes for updates, the more time and money it will take to resolve issues and make the necessary changes. Save yourself the money and the headache!
What does Drupal Support and Maintenance Entail?
Numerous features classify Drupal as a large project. However, it can only be supported by a team of technical experts who can handle issues, learn from experience, and create improvements. Therefore, before you start looking for a partner, we believe you should be aware of the following standard services:
Drupal Core Update and Security Patch
The Drupal project provides releases for both client and server environments, ranging from a standard installation on any server to deployment plans based on how your site was built, with advanced options such as high memory and multiple sites on a single server for improved performance.
Sites that use modules, themes, or even core Drupal functionality should be updated at least once a year to minimize vulnerabilities created by earlier versions of these things that can lead to security breaches and sometimes disrupt site availability.
24/7 Monitoring
Numerous service providers host Drupal, and with one of them, you have access to 24/7 tracking that keeps an eye on your website whenever it's accessible. It can assist in identifying problems that could be causing your website to go down or to miss important information while notifying the user if something is wrong. Users can install Drupal with only one click from the site's main download page, but other websites can help with this task.
Enhancements
Every time new enhancements are made to a piece of software, those improvements can be included as new features, making the product easier to use and increasing functionality. For versions that can be updated, improvements such as security patches are quickly released once every month. In addition, Drupal's developers create modules suited to different websites, which they will eventually combine to make life easier for site visitors and assist game developers in designing games to add more value that is also integrated.
Bug Resolving
The secure code that supports Drupal can show that it is unbeatable against attacks like SQLi, XSS, or other vulnerabilities. Long-term users can also quickly locate and fix problems online if they don't have the software skills. It is because interest in new upgrades increases whenever something is made available by a method other than upgrading from an earlier version on the same website.
After a development phase, you might make enhancements continuously throughout release cycles. As part of efforts to add new features more quickly than in earlier upgrades before noticing all the benefits, updates will rely on this experience and other best practices from earlier releases.
Benefits of Choosing Drupal Support and Maintenance Services
- You have a complete analysis of your website's design, conversions, and traffic.
- You have a Drupal website up and running.
- You have high support for any website-related issue.
- Any problem that is found will be resolved quickly and effectively.
- You have access to regular store operations reports.
- You receive timely information about optimization and updates.
Conclusion
Drupal is a highly flexible platform for creating visually stunning and dynamic websites. However, like any other platform, it requires regular maintenance to operate effectively. As an experienced Drupal development company, Innoraft understands how important it is to keep your Drupal-powered project running correctly.
Furthermore, with Drupal 7 reaching the end of life in November 2023, you will require a service provider to assist you in migrating to Drupal 9. If migration is not in the cards for the time being, you will still need D7 support after the end of life. However, it is nearly time to migrate to Drupal 9, as it is already experiencing continuous innovation, with minor upgrades and versions released frequently.
Innoraft provides complete Drupal maintenance plan services for businesses looking for professionals to handle their Drupal website's complex, integrated, and continuous requirements. Our team ensures that your Drupal website functions correctly and generates the desired business results when you work with us. So, if you're searching for expert Drupal support and maintenance, don't hesitate to contact us.
