Drupal is a great platform that has a great community and a great number of sites developed thanks to it. What makes it so great? What helps Drupal stand out among the competition? We’ve explained you 6 reasons why you'll love Drupal websites, and if you do love them and have your own website on Drupal now, then this article will give you a hint about what you should pay attention to stand out among your business competitors and defeat them.
Must-haves of a competitive and successful Drupal site
Site available all the time
There is no use for a website, even an attractive and multifunctional one, when it’s down and no one can reach it. So along with optimizing your website important features, don’t forget to monitor your server uptime and downtime to make sure it’s up and running and be able to fix any issues in a timely manner if it goes down.
Site available on all devices
To survive in the mobile technology age your website cannot do without mobile web design and mobile development. In order to satisfy the needs of mobile users and make your web resource available on their devices, you can build a mobile app or make your site mobile-friendly, for example, making it responsive with a perfect layout which displays well on all screen sizes at once.
Despite the fact that the number of mobile users is growing, desktops are still being used. The research on cross-device customers show that people usually use mobile phones and tablets to surf the web, discover their issue and find answers to their questions. After they have found what they need, they switch to desktops for purchasing or ordering goods and services, or completing other actions with bigger and more convenient screen and keyboard. Doing cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility testing helps check whether your software product is available on all browsers and platforms of all desktop and mobile devices, where new models regularly appear.
Site available for all users
Meeting web accessibility standards is one more way to make your web resource available and accessible for all, including Internet users with special needs. Drupal 8 has improvements allowing you take a progressive step toward the needs of people with audial, visual and other impairments like deafness or color blindness. Remove the obstacles to let understand your site as textual and multimedia content easily.
Site that loads pages as fast as possible
No one likes to wait, or people who force them to wait. If you aren’t able to give things here and now, then your potential site visitors and clients will run away from you to your competitors for better alternatives. Load speed impacts UX and SEO as well, because search engines care about providing a positive user experience by prioritizing pages that load quicker and ranking them higher. Google even marks AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) with the lightning sign on search engine result page (SERP) to make them noticeable for users.
So use some tools to test and optimize your site’s speed or ask some support service like ours to improve the performance of your site to let it not just run faster but fly;)
Well-secured site
There is no sense in a furniture rich house without a lock, and there is no sense in a feature rich site without a proper security system. It’s impossible to defeat competitors while not being secure from hacker attacks and other cyber threats. With many official Government sites from all over the world built-in Drupal security is one of Drupal benefits.
Drupal core and modules are regularly updated. So, just check whether you have implemented all the latest updates as well as removing old and redundant modules. Also, switch to HTTPS (if you haven’t done this already), make passwords work perfectly and follow other security rules to protect your Drupal site.
SEO-optimized site
Use the power of search engine optimization to be easily found on the web, avoid major reasons for low website traffic, and increase organic traffic that comes from unpaid search results. If you take actions to ensure high security and performance levels to your web resource and follow other tips mentioned in this article, then you are halfway to the top of the search query result page. To get the other half of the way, contact a SEO specialist or follow some SEO practices by yourself.
Install helpful Drupal 8 modules for SEO to make your web pages easier for search engine bots to crawl, scan, and index. Publish unique content with keyword optimization in mind, don’t forget to update it and use other benefits of content marketing to make your content highly valued by search engines. Do SMM right, as this also influences on your rankings. Use Drupal modules for easy integration with social networks. Also, don’t forget to check broken links, redirects and whether URLs are clean or dirty. And, of course, don’t be lazy to constantly monitor your statistics with the help of web analytics tools like Google Analytics. By the way, it’s easy to integrate GA with Drupal 8 due to module.
Summing up
The main things every Drupal site should care about to defeat its competitors are: availability, performance, security and search engine optimization including all related issues.
If you need a professional help in Drupal website maintenance and support and, then contact our Drupal specialists.