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Riverside County, California, serves more than two million residents and operates a complex network of 48 public‑service websites. The county is the fourth largest in California and has a diverse population where English is the first language for roughly two‑thirds of residents and Spanish for about 27 %. Its digital ecosystem provides services such as housing assistance, employment resources, business regulation, public notices and voter registration.

The county’s legacy web platform suffered from rising subscription costs caused by bot traffic, slow load times and expensive manual deployments. To modernise this multisite ecosystem, the County partnered with Axelerant's team to upgrade all sites to Drupal 10 and implement centralised management via Acquia Cloud Site Factory (ACSF). The project aimed to improve performance, accessibility and scalability while ensuring compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and supporting bilingual content.

About the project

Goals and Challenges

The County of Riverside managed a complex ecosystem of 48 government websites serving over two million residents. Each site delivered localised information on housing, employment, business regulation, and public services. However, the infrastructure was becoming costly, fragmented, and difficult to manage. The County’s main goals were to:

  • Control escalating costs driven by inflated page views caused by bot traffic.

  • Improve performance across all 48 sites through caching, database, and image optimizations.

  • Automate deployments to reduce manual intervention and downtime.

  • Strengthen accessibility through an ADA-compliant design framework (currently an ongoing initiative).

  • Unify management and multilingual content updates within a single platform to better serve English and Spanish-speaking residents.

  • Enhance security to proactively mitigate threats in a high-traffic government environment.

Implementation and Approach

To address these challenges, Axelerant upgraded all sites to Drupal 10, providing long-term stability and access to modern performance and accessibility features. A centralised CI/CD pipeline using BLT and Acquia Cloud Factory Hooks automated code deployments and reduced downtime, ensuring consistent delivery across the entire ecosystem.

Caching layers were optimised using Varnish and Redis, improving response times and reducing server strain. Bot traffic was analysed and filtered, aligning true visitor metrics with Acquia subscription limits to eliminate unnecessary cost overruns.

Using Acquia Cloud Site Factory (ACSF), the County centralised control of all 48 sites. This allowed for consistent updates, governance, and content deployment across a shared codebase, while maintaining independence for each department’s specific content needs.

To support a multilingual audience, GTranslate was integrated to streamline bilingual content delivery and expand support for additional languages as needed.

For accessibility, the County—guided by Axelerant—is developing a scalable ADA compliance framework built on reusable components within ACSF. This ensures accessibility enhancements can be deployed progressively across all sites without disrupting ongoing operations.

Outcomes and Impact

  • Cost Efficiency: By mitigating bot traffic and optimising caching, the County reduced inflated page views and remained within Acquia subscription limits—directly lowering infrastructure costs.

  • Operational Reliability: Automated deployments and CI/CD pipelines minimised downtime, improved release consistency, and streamlined maintenance.

  • Performance Gains: Server load and disk usage were reduced through caching, compression, and database optimisation, delivering faster and more responsive user experiences.

  • Governance and Scalability: Managing 48 sites from a unified ACSF platform simplified governance and positioned the County for future expansion without additional overhead.

  • Ongoing Accessibility and Inclusivity: The ADA compliance initiative is advancing toward a consistent, scalable approach to accessible design across all sites, ensuring inclusive public service delivery for every resident.

Why Drupal was chosen

The project team evaluated several content‑management frameworks and chose Drupal 10 for its enterprise‑ready features:

  • Modern editorial experience: Drupal 10 ships with CKEditor 5, providing real‑time collaborative editing, improved media embedding and a mobile‑responsive WYSIWYG interface. This was vital for a government platform with dozens of content editors.

  • Accessible administration and themes: The Claro admin theme offers improved contrast and keyboard navigation, while the Olivero front‑end theme delivers WCAG 2.1‑AA compliant markup designed for government and non‑profit use cases. These built‑in themes reduced the cost of meeting ADA requirements.

  • Multilingual capabilities: Drupal’s core stores content as structured data, allowing translations to be managed at the field level; administrators can choose which fields are translatable and which inherit default values Drupal can be configured to display multilingual interfaces and integrates with translation management systems.

  • Performance and scalability: Drupal’s API‑first architecture is built on Symfony 6, offering better performance and access to modern PHP features. Reverse‑proxy caching layers such as Varnish significantly reduce server load and page‑load times.

  • Configuration management & CI/CD support: Drupal 10 improves configuration management, making CI/CD pipelines more predictable. Combined with Acquia Cloud Site Factory, it enables centralized management of multiple sites from one codebase.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version: