Multisite governance, accessibility compliance, and D7 migrations for colleges and universities.
The reasons universities pick Drupal are not marketing points. They are answers to specific campus problems: decentralized content, strict accessibility rules, and large multi-department sites that need shared governance.
A university is not one website, it is the admissions site, twelve faculty sites, the library, the alumni portal, and a research center that wants its own look. Drupal multisite lets every department run its own site while IT keeps one codebase, one update cycle, and one security posture. This is the single biggest reason Drupal wins on campus, and the thing WordPress struggles with past a handful of sites.
US universities get ADA and Section 508 complaints, and some get sued. Drupal core ships with WCAG 2.1 AA support: ARIA roles, keyboard navigation, alt-text enforcement, and an accessible admin so your editors do not break compliance by accident. We still audit every build with axe and a screen reader, but Drupal gives you a defensible starting point instead of a pile of plugins.
A department editor should publish their own pages and touch nothing else. Drupal's field-level access control and content moderation are in core, so you can give 200 staff the exact access they need without handing anyone the keys. Approval workflows mean a student worker drafts and a comms officer publishes.
Course catalogs, faculty directories, event calendars, and program pages are all structured data, not loose blog posts. Drupal's content types, fields, and Views let you model that once and reuse it everywhere, so a faculty profile updates in one place and flows to every page that references it.
Higher ed runs on systems Drupal has to talk to: SSO via SAML or CAS, the student information system, Salesforce for advancement, and event platforms. Drupal's API-first architecture and mature contrib modules connect to these without the lock-in a SaaS site forces on you.
A coordinated security team, granular permissions, and a track record at government and university scale mean Drupal usually passes the security review that a campus procurement office runs. That alone shortens a lot of approval cycles.
New university site, a multisite consolidation, or a Drupal 7 migration that is now overdue? We scope it against your departments, your accessibility obligations, and your campus systems, then build on Drupal 10 or 11.
We do not push Drupal on every education project. A single small program site, a one-off microsite, or a club page does not need multisite governance, and WordPress is cheaper to staff for that. Drupal earns its keep when you have many departments, strict accessibility rules, or deep system integrations. For a simple site, we will tell you so.
Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) is the heavyweight of open-source ecommerce — built for B2B, multi-store, multi-warehouse retail at scale. Powerful but demanding: serious projects only, served by senior engineers.
A lean, free, MVC-architected ecommerce platform that runs on standard LAMP hosting. Strong fit for small-and-mid-business stores that need flexibility without Magento's overhead or Shopify's monthly tax.
WordPress powers 43% of websites worldwide — from solo blogs to enterprise corporate sites. We build, support, and customize WP projects from $99/mo.
Multisite, accessibility, and permissions. A university needs many department sites under one brand, strict WCAG and Section 508 compliance, and fine-grained editorial access for a large staff. Drupal does all three in core. WordPress can approximate them with plugins, but at campus scale the plugin stack becomes its own maintenance and security burden.
Urgent. Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025, so it no longer receives official security coverage. Paid vendor support can buy you a few months, but it is a bridge, not a fix. If you are on 7, plan a migration to Drupal 10 or 11 now, this is the most common project we take on for education clients.
No. The elite-university stat is misleading. A mid-sized college with 30 or 40 department sites, an accessibility obligation, and a small web team is exactly where Drupal multisite pays off, arguably more than a huge university with a dedicated platform team. The deciding factor is complexity, not enrollment.
Yes, that is a core strength. Drupal’s role and permission system, plus content moderation, lets each department edit its own content under an approval workflow without being able to touch anyone else’s site or the configuration. You can onboard dozens of editors without losing control.
Drupal gives you a strong starting point, WCAG 2.1 AA support is built into core and the admin, but no platform makes you compliant on its own. Editors can still add an inaccessible PDF or a missing alt text. We pair the Drupal build with editor training and an audit using axe and a screen reader before launch.
Through mature contrib modules and its API-first architecture. We integrate SAML or CAS single sign-on, pull from the student information system, and connect advancement tools like Salesforce. Because Drupal is open, these integrations are not gated behind a vendor’s app marketplace.
It depends on scope, a single departmental site is far less than a multisite consolidation or a full D7 migration. Custom builds with us start around $7,000 and scale with the number of sites, integrations, and content to migrate. We give a fixed scope after a short discovery call.
Sometimes. Education-focused distributions and accelerators can speed up a standard build, but they also carry assumptions and extra modules you may not want to maintain. We assess whether a distribution fits or whether a lean custom build is cleaner for your team. The right answer depends on how much your campus deviates from the distribution’s defaults.
Most articles about Drupal in higher education open with the same stat: a large share of the world’s top universities run on Drupal. True, but not very useful if you are a mid-sized college with a small web team and a Drupal 7 site that is about to fall off security support. We build and migrate education sites for that exact situation, so this page is less about Oxford and Harvard and more about the problems a real campus team faces: governance across dozens of departments, accessibility you can be sued over, and a migration you can no longer put off.
The form below is pre-tagged: cms=drupal, site_type=education. CRM will know exactly which combination you came from.
