Accessibility, security, and FedRAMP hosting handled. Why Drupal is the default CMS for public-sector sites, and how we build and migrate them.
Section 508 accessibility in core, a security model that clears procurement, FedRAMP hosting on Acquia or Pantheon, and multisite that scales across a whole agency network without multiplying your patch workload.
Drupal core ships with Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA support: proper ARIA roles, keyboard navigation, alt-text enforcement, and an accessible admin. For a US government site that is a legal requirement, not a nice-to-have. On WordPress you assemble this from plugins and hope they keep up. We still audit every build with axe and a screen reader before launch, but Drupal gives us a clean starting point.
Drupal has a dedicated security team, a clear advisory process, and granular per-role permissions down to the field level. More than 150 national governments run on it, and it is the platform behind GovCMS in Australia and a long list of US federal and state sites. That track record is why it clears procurement and security review where other CMSs stall.
You do not have to host government Drupal yourself. Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Pantheon both offer FedRAMP-authorized environments, and GovCMS gives Australian agencies a managed option. We deploy to whichever your compliance team has already approved, so hosting is not the thing that holds up your authority to operate.
Drupal multisite lets a single codebase run dozens of department or agency sites with shared components and separate content teams. For a city or a state agency network, that means one security patch covers every site instead of thirty separate update cycles. It is the feature that makes Drupal cost-effective at the scale governments actually operate.
Public-sector content goes through review. Drupal core has content moderation states (draft, needs review, published), revision history, and scheduled publishing without a single extra module. Communications staff draft, a supervisor approves, and nothing goes live by accident. WordPress needs plugins for the same workflow.
Drupal is free and GPL-licensed. There is no per-seat fee and no vendor that can raise your license cost at renewal. For a public budget that has to be defended line by line, open source is an easy answer, and the code can be handed to any qualified vendor if you change partners.
New public-sector site or a Drupal 7 migration that is now overdue? We build on accessible themes, deploy to your approved FedRAMP host, harden the configuration, and test with a screen reader before launch. You get a fixed quote after scoping, not open-ended hours.
We do not push Drupal on every public-sector project. A small departmental site with no sensitive data and a non-technical team is often cheaper to run on WordPress. We will tell you when that is the honest call.
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Security model, accessibility, and permissions. Drupal has field-level access control, content moderation in core, and Section 508 / WCAG 2.1 AA support out of the box. WordPress can get there with plugins, but every plugin is another thing to patch and another line in a security review. For a public-facing agency site under compliance rules, we recommend Drupal. For a simple departmental blog with no sensitive data, WordPress is fine and cheaper to staff.
Drupal core targets WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508, and the admin interface itself is accessible (most CMSs ignore the back end). That said, compliance is never automatic — a bad theme or a careless content editor can break it. We build on accessible themes, test with axe and NVDA/VoiceOver, and train your content team on alt text and heading structure before handover.
Yes. The application is open source; the compliance comes from the hosting environment. Acquia Cloud Site Factory and Pantheon both run FedRAMP-authorized platforms, and we deploy to whichever your agency has approved. We handle the Drupal side — configuration hardening, patch cadence, and security review — so your authority-to-operate paperwork is not held up by the CMS.
Urgent. Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025. It no longer receives official security updates, which is a finding waiting to happen in any audit. The move is to Drupal 10 or 11, and it is a rebuild rather than an in-place update because the architecture changed. We scope it as a migration project: content model, theme, and custom modules ported deliberately. Start with our Drupal migration service.
It depends on scope, but as a real range: a single department site with standard content types runs roughly 8,000 to 20,000 USD to build. A multisite platform serving a network of agency sites, with custom workflows and integrations, runs higher. Hosting on a FedRAMP platform is a separate annual cost set by Acquia or Pantheon. We give a fixed quote after a scoping call, not an open-ended hourly estimate.
A standard single-site government build is usually 6 to 10 weeks from kickoff to launch, including accessibility testing and content migration. A multisite platform or a Drupal 7 migration with heavy custom code takes longer. We work in milestones so you see a staging site early and are not waiting until the end to react.
Yes, and this is one of its strongest cases. Drupal multisite runs many sites from one codebase with shared design components and separate editorial teams. One security patch covers all of them. For a city, county, or state network, that turns thirty update cycles into one, which is where the cost savings come from at public-sector scale.
Yes. Drupal releases security advisories on a schedule, and a government site has to apply them promptly. We offer a maintenance retainer that covers core and module patching, accessibility re-checks, and uptime monitoring. If you have in-house developers, we can hand off with documentation instead. What you should not do is launch and walk away — an unpatched CMS is the most common audit finding.
For a wider view of how we build and maintain Drupal sites, see the Drupal development services overview and the Drupal platform hub. If you are still on Drupal 7, the Drupal migration service is where to start — Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025 and no longer gets security fixes.
The form below is pre-tagged: cms=drupal, site_type=government. CRM will know exactly which combination you came from.
