Drupal 11 Upgrade: RWU Boosted Speed, Security & Editorial Agility

Roger Williams University (RWU) is a nationally recognized private university offering a diverse range of undergraduate and graduate programs. Their digital presence plays a crucial role in engaging students, faculty, alumni, and prospective applicants, making platform stability and performance a top priority.
High Education
Client’s Objectives
  • Upgrade the website from Drupal 9 to Drupal 11 for long-term platform support
  • Improve performance and Core Web Vitals for better user experience
  • Streamline page building with paragraph-based components
  • Preserve SEO equity and existing URL structures during the transition
  • Strengthen security posture and governance standards
Clients-challenge
Client’s Challenge:

RWU’s site was running on Drupal 9 and required a timely upgrade to stay secure and performant. The university needed to modernize its content authoring experience without disrupting its SEO performance or design consistency. Key pain points included:

  • Looming Drupal 9 end-of-life, creating potential security and compatibility risks
  • Rigid page-building workflows slowing down content updates
  • Inconsistent performance metrics impacting site speed and search visibility
  • Manual checks and redirects creating room for human error
  • Lack of standardized governance patterns to ensure consistent branding across pages

How we solved
The Solution We Implemented:

To address these challenges, we delivered a comprehensive upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 11, ensuring a seamless transition with minimal downtime. The implementation was structured for speed, resilience, and flexibility.

Technology Stack:
  • CMS: Drupal 11
  • Deployment: Blue/Green with automated rollback
  • Caching: CDN + image pipeline + lazy loading
Key Implementation Highlights:
  • Conducted deprecation scans, module readiness checks, and Composer updates
  • Executed a blue/green deployment strategy with rollback rehearsals for risk mitigation
  • Introduced paragraph-based components and a governed component library for flexible layouts
  • Optimized performance through CDN caching, lazy-loading, and an improved image pipeline
  • Implemented a redirect matrix and automated link checks to safeguard SEO equity
  • Hardened governance, CI/CD monitoring, and SLAs for operational resilience

Impact on client
Impact on Client’s Business:

The upgrade delivered clear performance and operational gains for RWU:

  • Site speed improved by 48%, LCP reduced from 4.1s to 2.2s
  • Core Web Vitals “Good” score rose to 92% from 63%
  • Editors assemble pages 35% faster with reusable components
  • Future upgrades simplified, reducing effort by 40%
  • Downtime risk minimized, achieving 99.98% uptime with monitoring and rollback

 
Closing thoughts

By upgrading to Drupal 11, RWU unlocked a faster, more secure, and future-ready platform—without sacrificing stability or SEO performance. With flexible content components and automated deployment strategies, their digital team can now deliver content with greater speed, consistency, and confidence.

Still on an older Drupal version?

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