7 Strategies to Maximize Your Drupal Investment

Time is money, so let’s cut to the chase and dive into how you should be maximizing your Drupal investment:

1. Track critical revenue generating paths and optimize

Every website has critical points of conversion and traffic. Load times for the homepage, and each page through the conversion funnel should be evaluated and prioritized for performance optimization. Optimizing page load times often results in revenue optimization as well, with decreases in load times directly linked to an increase in conversions, and therefore more revenue. Follow the money, and your task list for Drupal optimizations should be clear.

2. Accelerate and improve quality of developer operations

Standardize automated testing, deployment operations, and release windows to maximize your return on investment. Long lasting benefits of a well-defined and optimized release management pipeline are faster deploy times, with less risk, and a faster time to market for higher business impact over the year. Some say business success is defined by iterative optimizations, so make sure you’re capitalizing on the vested interest of your team as often as possible with more iterations of a greater quality.

3. Identify common build patterns and features

Working with experienced developers means gaining insights into the best ways to build systems with reduced risk and ease of supportability.. Find the right partner to elevate your solutions architecture and select the most profitable path forward, with the least risk.

4. Don’t upgrade—evolve your architecture

Progressively upgrade your Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8 with reduced long-term cost of ownership by deploying a mixed-Drupal architecture.  By progressively upgrading, your platform can consistently gain new feature sets while also raising standards to keep pace with the new platform technologies. Opting to leverage a reverse-proxy load balancer enables mixing your end-user experience across multiple Drupal versions. With your Drupal architecture progressively evolving, upgrade costs can be spread out, clearing a path for a faster timeline to ROI.

5. Mitigate security risks with automated build operations

Managing security and compliance across multiple environments, development teams, and QA resources is easier with automated build operations. Build from composer. Build from make files. It does not matter—just build and do it often. Have a large number of sites that you are monitoring with unique architectures? Leverage community contributions like Drupal Remote Dashboard to consolidate your site monitoring and updates. 

6. Waste less time testing and spend more time building

Automated testing is your friend. The earlier you invest—the sooner you see ROI with reduced manual QA costs and an increase quality of developer output by creating a shorter feedback loop.

7. Optimize administrative workflows to maximize business output and increase ROI

This is often overlooked by most companies we work with. If the overhead of the staff interacting with your Drupal editorial experience has a significant impact on your monthly ROI, then you must consider optimizing their work output as this also is a critical expense-generating (and therefore revenue generating) path. Optimize the performance of your editorial experience through Drupal performance optimization and Drupal editorial workflow optimization. Remove unnecessary steps in the workflows. Offload slow Drupal processes to cron jobs so they don’t impact your Drupal editor’s throughput. 

 

In summary, optimizing the various revenue and expense generating paths is critical to marrying the value between your developer output, editorial output, Drupal application performance, stability, and end-user experience. Identifying how money flows into and out of your business is critical to our Digital Foundations philosophy here at Facet—and paramount to your success.