A modern website for higher education institutions goes beyond aesthetics; it is a reflection of the institution's commitment to innovation, quality, and responsiveness to the needs of prospective students. Just as an impressive campus entrance and welcoming staff can create a positive in-person impression, an intuitive, visually appealing, and informative website experience can do the same digitally. Whereas an outdated website can convey a message of stagnation, implying that the institution is not keeping up with the advancing technology and trends or not investing in the student experience, compelling them to explore other educational options. This is why having a dynamic, user-friendly website built on a flexible and powerful CMS platform like Drupalis so important.

Drupal is an open-sourceContent Management System (CMS) that has become a top choice for building enterprise-level websites. It is used by over 1% of all websites, powering over 1.5 million sites. With its robust features, expansive capabilities including real-time content updates, personalization, and thousands of add-ons and in-built modules, Drupal provides institutions with the tools to create a unique, tailored website. This enables them to effortlessly cater to the needs of employees, students, and prospective students, thereby making the institution or university stand out.

Here are some of the key reasons why Drupal CMS is ideal for higher education websites:

Easy-to-customize website

One of the biggest advantages of Drupal is its customization. It is built on a modular architecture, which means it consists of a core framework with a set of essential features and functionalities, and additional functionality is added through modules, allowing institutions to select the features and functionality they need to craft a website that reflects their brand and strengths.

With thousands of free and paid modules and themes to extend Drupal's capabilities, institutions can continually adapt their site to control their visual identity, customize content types to add new degree programs or courses, highlight campus events, enable online applications, etc.

Drupal CMS is perfect for higher education institutions with numerous departments, programs, research centers, libraries, and sports teams, each with its own website or web presence. Its structure and multi-site capabilities allow institutions to manage and update content for multiple websites from a single unified platform, streamlining content management.

Learn how to optimize your Drupal website for better performance.

Seamless content workflows

Managing a website that constantly evolves with new and updated content can be challenging. Drupal CMS simplifies the process. It provides a centralized repository where universities can store all their content and access it from anywhere, thus enhancing collaboration and content consistency. Creating, editing, and publishing new content is intuitive with custom workflows to match the specific needs and approval processes of the institution. Drupal's editor enhances content with rich text formatting, media embedding, and interactive features, valuable for creating engaging educational content like application pages, quizzes, and multimedia materials.

Granular user permissions allow universities to securely access and manage their respective sections of the website without risking the integrity of the entire site. Drupal also integrates with data sources like directories and calendars to automatically pull in updated details, vital for universities presenting dynamic content like faculty profiles and event schedules.

Explore how to rethink your content strategy with 3Rs.

SEO and accessibility

A higher education website must be easily discoverable by prospective students conducting online searches. With SEO-friendly architecture, flexible content structuring, clean URL generation, and mobile-responsive design, Drupal optimizes websites to rank higher in search engine results. Drupal promises rapid page loading, supports structured data for better content comprehension, and empowers content revision and version control. Drupal's SEO-friendly modules, such as "Yoast SEO," simplify optimization tasks, while customizable taxonomies accommodate the diverse content needs of universities.

Drupal also adheres to web accessibility standards, enhancing access and usability for both users and admins with disabilities. The system generates semantic HTML, includes ARIA roles, and works well with screen readers. This not only helps establish an inclusive user experience, but also enhances search engine rankings as accessibility standards play a key role in determining search results placement.

Learn more about optimizing your higher education website for search engines with Drupal.

Robust security

Security is a top priority for any university website handling large amounts of personal data of students and staff. Drupal incorporates robust security capabilities and best practices including:

• User authentication and role-based permissions to control access
• Password encryption and policies
• Granular control over who can view, edit, create, or delete content
• Built-in web application firewall, mitigating common vulnerabilities like XSS and SQL injections
• SSL/HTTPS encryption for transmitted data
• Input validation and sanitization to prevent malicious code in forms
• Automated security updates and advisories about vulnerabilities or misconfigurations

 

Apart from these, there are many security-focused modules like single sign-on authentication, two-factor authentication, audit logging, bot detection, and more to the Drupal website, and help secure sensitive institutional and student information.

Cost efficiency

Drupal delivers exceptional value in budget, compared to expensive proprietary systems. Being an open-source CMS, it is entirely free to use. Many universities harness Drupal's capabilities through developers and add-ons, which is a cost-effective approach compared to alternatives. Drupal's modular structure allows universities to pay only for the specific features they need, avoiding unnecessary expenses. This flexibility also prevents vendor lock-in, offering financial adaptability for future changes. With a community-driven ecosystem, ongoing costs are low, as maintenance, troubleshooting, and enhancements can be efficiently managed by internal resources supplemented by contractors.

Strong support network

A common concern with open- source platforms is the availability of ongoing support and maintenance. However, Drupal boasts a very active, global community with thousands of developers who contribute modules and best practices. There are also numerous third-party providers that offer a spectrum of Drupal-related services, like development, hosting, security, and training services. This helps universities with limited internal resources to readily access experienced Drupal developers to handle anything from the initial wireframing to ongoing enhancement and troubleshooting. universities the support they may need to implement Drupal for their digital presence.

Conclusion

Drupal’s success across higher education demonstrates that it can scale and perform well for individual needs. 71% of the top 100 universities use Drupal, including MIT, the University of Oxford, Stanford, and every Ivy League school. These leading institutions prefer Drupal for its ability to support complex, content-heavy sites with high visibility and traffic loads. With its personalization features, integrated AI and analytics capabilities, customized theme and quality development, universities can deliver content that caters to the individual needs and preferences of their diverse user base.

If you want to elevate your university’s digital presence, consider basing it on Drupal CMS to build an engaging website that will deliver a highly relevant and satisfying user experience to the digitally accustomed generation and achieve your enrollment goals. Although moving a website to a new CMS can be challenging, with the right strategy and execution, you can get enhanced content management, security, scalability, and customization capabilities.

Altudo, a global digital marketing and technology consulting company, is a certified Drupal partner. With extensive knowledge and experience in customized Drupal development and migration, we can help you migrate your educational website seamlessly and tailor it to your university's unique content and functionality needs.

Contact us today to explore how Drupal can benefit your university and plan a systematic Drupal migration roadmap.