Why Choose Drupal As Your CMS?

SilverDisc believes the three prerequisites of any successful website are speed, security and availability. These are at the centre of all of our site builds and Drupal is our platform of choice for ensuring each website we build meets each of these prerequisites.

SilverDisc has 12 years of experience developing Drupal sites across multiple versions. When it comes to Drupal, we’ve seen and done it all. This blog post will explain why Drupal is our go-to CMS and highlight some of the great Drupal features our clients benefit from.

Choose Drupal For Speed

A fast website is essential for maximising conversions and user experience. Users are not willing to wait for websites to load and a slow website could lead your customers to go elsewhere.

One of the benefits of Drupal is its core caching functionality, which speeds up the site with minimal configuration needed. Drupal’s flexible nature also allows us to easily configure other page speed measures, such as lazy loading, WebP images, CDN integration and server scaling.

All SilverDisc websites are designed and built with speed in mind, so our clients and their customers reap all the benefits of a fast site. Drupal allows us to do this effectively.

Choose Drupal For Security

Security is arguably the most important factor for a website, especially when sensitive data is stored. It can have disastrous effects for your brand if that data gets into the wrong hands - as several household names have proven over the years. For example, in October 2013 the Adobe site was hacked and 153 million user records were stolen - exposing customer names, addresses and payment information. This cost Adobe over $2 million in legal fees and settlement fees. The shattered trust for customers made this a terrible situation for the company.

The CMS you choose for your website can help you to mitigate these security risks. For example, Drupal allows fine-grain control with user permissions. This enables us to configure sites with complete control over what users can see and modify on the site. Not only does this allow us to keep security locked down tight, but it enables us to streamline the user interface, offering a simple and stress-free editing experience for users.

Drupal has a dedicated security team comprised of experts ready to review and fix any security issues promptly. Security updates are released on a regular basis, helping to ensure all sites are protected from attacks. Drupal also has a large community of skilled developers, including SilverDisc developers who contribute to the security of the platform.

To complement the excellent Drupal security features, SilverDisc has an experienced system administrator with systems in place to monitor sites 24 hours a day - recording and applying security updates as soon as they are reported. Websites hosted with SilverDisc are backed up daily, so in the unlikely event of a breach, they can be back online within hours. These are just a few of the many benefits of hosting your site with SilverDisc.

Choose Drupal For SEO

SilverDisc originally chose Drupal back in 2008 because it was the best platform for SEO. To this day, Drupal is still at the top for its SEO features. Given our strong reputation and proven track record for SEO, this is very important to us.

As previously mentioned, Drupal is fast. This is becoming increasingly important for SEO as Google gives priority to faster websites in the rankings. Drupal can also be extended to provide AMP functionality. AMP versions of pages are created automatically by the Drupal system, requiring minimal maintenance for maximum gain.

Drupal also assists with creating configurable XML sitemaps, automatically updated by the system when new content is added. This means Google will always be able to find and crawl your pages effectively.

The Drupal Metatag and Schema modules offer an unrivalled set of SEO markup fields. Drupal offers the use of tokens as shown in the image above, which ensures that pages created by our clients are always “SEO ready”.

Choose Drupal for Flexibility

Drupal is extendable by nature. This means that a site made with Drupal and SilverDisc is able to grow alongside you as a business. New components and features can be added to the sites without compromising on performance.

Drupal’s built-in API makes it easy to set up automation, and SilverDisc has implemented several custom modules for our clients. One example is the Gardenlines site. The Drupal API allowed us to create complex product feeds for Gardenlines, which are managed and imported straight from a Google Sheet.

There is a wide selection of modules that can be installed to extend site functionality. SilverDisc has developers with experience in creating bespoke solutions so that as well as meeting the three prerequisites for a successful website, your site can also help you to reach your unique business goals.

Not only do you need a fast, secure and reliable CMS such as Drupal, but you also need a team with the expert knowledge to build your website and maintain it to the highest standards. That’s where SilverDisc comes in. Our web development team is well-versed in all things Drupal, and we’re here to help you get the most out of your online presence.

If you have any questions about any of the points raised here or if you would like to discuss a new website for your company, please get in touch.