Drupal is a community-driven, flexible open-source CMS that makes seamless digital experiences. Since Drupal is constantly evolving, you need to keep your site and yourself up-to-date to stay ahead of the curve of technological change. Here are 8 benefits of upgrading to Drupal 9 for marketing and IT teams.
With features such as simple content authoring, customization, multilingual capabilities, and headless CMS — it’s no wonder Drupal has so many users!
Even though the most recent upgrade, Drupal 9, was published in June 2020, many websites still use Drupal 8, and the vast majority use Drupal 7. In fact, Drupal 7 is still used by 69.5% of sites (about 400,000), whereas Drupal 8 is used by 24% (around 138,000). If you’re one of the many who haven’t upgraded to Drupal 9 yet, you’re missing out on many awesome improvements on the features you love from Drupal 7 or 8. You may not want to deal with the hassle of upgrading, and we can’t blame you, but the point of doing it now is to make upgrading easier later. And with Drupal 7 soon reaching the end of its life (November 2023), it’s time to get yourself in gear and switch to Drupal 9.
As a marketer, you might wonder why you should care about all this development. What difference does it make to you anyway? Drupal has placed marketers and content authors at the center of its development plan. A win for marketers, right?! Drupal 8 and 9 have established a more significant focus on the importance of digital experience: something all marketers and developers alike care about. Here are 4 benefits of upgrading to Drupal 9 that marketers should care about.
Say goodbye to boring cookie-cutter websites. Drupal has the power to deliver fully customized experiences to your website users so you can craft something unique for your users. It also allows you to segment users across devices, and track and report customization performance.
With Drupal, you can easily combine and integrate with external analytics tools and data platforms. By combining these tools, you can provide a unified experience across all channels and have all your data in one place. Combined platforms = less of a headache.
Drupal 9 has streamlined integration with e-commerce platforms, which really just means less work for you. This upgrade allows you to sync products from e-commerce sites as entities on Drupal sites to provide a more content-driven e-commerce experience.
With enhanced API capabilities, Drupal has improved the integration process with DAM and PIM systems. Drupal helps centralize and optimize digital assets and information to help you manage organizations’ online presence.
Drupal 9 has introduced several improved features like more accessible upgrade pathways, increased functionality for cross-functional performance, and extended dynamic developer tooling. There's so much to love for technical and IT teams, but here are 4 features we want to highlight.
Drupal 9 promises better overall performance thanks to improved caching techniques, page caching, block caching, and views caching that are available by default. This means better performance with less work for you!
Drupal 9’s redesigned UI and Admin Navigation System allow for more streamlined mobile-first management of content, taxonomy, users, blocks, and themes. This means the ability to manage CMS updates and modifications from anywhere, even from the comfort of your couch.
The Autoload functionality defaulted in Drupal 8 and 9 allows modules to inherit dependencies that will be loaded only when needed. Look forward to improved website performance and faster load times!
With an improved templating process using the TWIG template engine, which does not allow PHP or other code in theme templates, your codebase will be cleaner. In addition, deprecations will be removed to improve the website's efficiency further, as deprecated codes will no longer be supported.
So, are you ready to enjoy all the benefits of the Drupal 9 upgrade? The process doesn’t have to be intimidating or painful — we promise. The migration to Drupal 9 depends on whether you’re currently using Drupal 7 or 8, making it a little more complex. However, they have some amazing guides on preparing your Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 site to upgrade to Drupal 9.
As a Drupal-certified agency and Acquia partner, our Drupal experts can help you on your way to Drupal 9, no matter your website’s needs. We can help simplify this process, so you can begin enjoying all the benefits and improvements Drupal 9 has to offer.
