Site Factory | Redesign | Maintenance | UX - UI
As a leading global player in its sector, our client operates in nearly 200 countries and employs around 50,000 people. This French international group aimed to accelerate its digital transformation by deploying a new ecosystem based on a Drupal multisite platform.
About the project
From Drupal Technical Debt to Project Success: A Dual Challenge
When we were consulted by the client's IT Director, we discovered a website developed under Drupal by a previous service provider. It had significant technical and structural issues impacting security, accessibility, and performance.
The Takeover of the Drupal Ecosystem by Parker+Parker
The previous provider had not developed the website following best practices. Here’s a list of issues we identified:
- An architecture that did not follow a multisite model.
- Uncommented and poorly thought-out code.
- Modifications to community modules.
- Over 80 modules installed without quality checks...
Ultimately, the site was unstable, slow, poorly optimized for SEO, and had required significant fixes for months, causing stress and dissatisfaction among the business teams.
💊 Recovery of the Drupal Project
Our Drupal team at Parker+Parker stepped in to address these issues. We began with a technical audit, presented a detailed report to the client, outlined the technical debt, and prioritized tasks accordingly. With the client’s approval, we established a recovery roadmap and mobilized a team of Drupal experts.
We rebuilt the Drupal site, adopting a central model with country-specific versions, offering a simplified and centralized management system: a multisite platform. We also redesigned the Back Office and cleaned up all the code.
Once the technical recovery was completed, the site became stable. We then focused on improving performance (accessibility, SEO, etc.) and added new websites to the multisite platform, increasing it from 15 to 25 sites to date. In 2021 and 2023, we also deployed two complex e-commerce platforms for different markets within the site factory. We also upgraded the entire ecosystem, migrating it progressively through Drupal 8, 9, and now 10. In parallel, we have continued to significantly evolve the site, working with the teams in a highly constructive manner.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal is perfectly suited to large, complex ecosystems like the one we were working with. Given that the site was already on Drupal, it made sense to leverage its powerful core capabilities while addressing the technical debt left by the previous implementation. Drupal’s flexibility allows for building a scalable, multisite platform, which is essential for managing numerous localized sites under one ecosystem.
Moreover, the richness of Drupal’s open-source community enabled us to propose a versatile tool, tailored to meet both current and future needs. Its vast array of contributed modules and custom development possibilities allowed us to deliver a highly adaptable solution, optimizing performance, security, and back-office usability.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
