Rescuing a Drupal project in need of urgent assistance

Central Highlands Water were experiencing many issues with their current vendor and hosting provider. The website was offline intermittently on a number of occasions, the site was not secure, patches were not up-to-date and they were dealing with an unresponsive vendor who would not respond to their requests in a timely manner.

In order to understand how we could help we first needed to talk with key stakeholders to understand the problems. Following these discussions we performed an audit of the website and environment and put together a plan of attack to get the website up running smoothly and securely as soon as possible.

We first recommended moving the website from the existing host to the Acquia platform. This was a game changer that immediately resolved a number of the issues surrounding downtime. Acquia provides 3 distinct environments that made updates, testing and deployments less ad-hoc and more structured. Whilst migrating the website to the Acquia environment we took the opportunity to update all of modules and core Drupal code and deploy to the staging environment for testing prior to finalising the migration. Once this was thoroughly tested and verified we were able to deploy.

Webplace provided digital services support such as new development, landing pages, user training, troubleshooting as well as ongoing patch and module updates for 18 months whilst a new website was being developed. We worked closely with the new vendor to ensure the transition was as smooth as possible.