Drupal excels in building enormous, mission-critical websites and their backends with colossal traffic and vast data. Moreover, Drupal is ahead in SEO as compared to its competitors too. Though the official website states that Drupal is a free and open-source content management platform, the word “free” is subject to obligations and questions.
Around 47,350 Drupal modules can be downloaded for free, but when your digital presence wants to acquire the multichannel approach at a large scale leveraging Drupal, the CMS is far from being free of cost.
Drupal cost varies with the increased features, inclusive of development, design, customisation, and implementation.
In order to implement this CMS to the disbursement, you need a team of proficient full-stack developers with high-end technical skills, such as ours at Enterprise Monkey.
A team of proficient full-stack developers, such as ours at Enterprise Monkey, are acquainted with the high-end technical skills needed to implement this CMS leading to the disbursement.
Let’s see how.
Is Building a Drupal Website Costly?
Well, there is no straightforward answer to this question. It depends on the different scenarios, like your website’s size, complexity, value-added and qualitative features, development agency, and readiness to adjust.
On top of that, Drupal implementation is a struggle for non-technical people as it is established as a developer’s tool.
For a Custom Drupal development: Depending upon the project scale, if your business requires websites with complex workflows and multiple content types, and can charge you around $100,000. Moreover, you must have clear insights and a profound vision of what you want, for example, distinctive features, user-interfaces capabilities, and designs.
- You should do your groundwork before hiring any Drupal website development agency.
Which Factors Affect the Drupal Development Cost?
The objectives and conjectures matter! With the in-built multilingual capabilities and flexible design of the CMS, Drupal, many businesses are willing to move, accepting the fact that there are some unavoidable and demanding blocks of hustles and operational challenges.
If you are one of them, consider the following factors that are surely going to impact the development cost of your project:
1. Quality:
Multiple checks are required to ensure the high quality of Drupal websites. From maintaining a high-profile website for big enterprises to consider and address all the issues, Drupal developers bear responsibility for everything.
Visual bugs can escalate, and data loss can happen; any tiny issue can create huge business losses. Developers are required to emphasise quality assurance. They certainly lessened the defect rates by:
- Performing automotive tests to avoid regressions
- Checking for hidden bugs
- Fixing broken links
- Testing for compatibility and functional performance
Overall, massive testing procedures are required before deployment involving spending loads of time and hard work to ensure the art quality project delivery.
All the above-mentioned summations automatically increase the Drupal development cost. One can also opt for a low-cost development on the condition of next-day bug fixing without transactions.
2. Size:
From the loading time of your website to Google rankings, page size matters. The developers can end up taking more time and money if you are looking for an increased number of the following components on your website:
- Integrations
- Sections
- Functionalities
- Features
3. Complexity:
The Drupal development cost highly depends on the project’s complexity. Some parts can be easy to contrast with the tougher ones. So, what makes your requirements complex? The value-added features and heavy editorial workflows, undoubtedly.
- Managing workflows can be a little hectic in the editorial domain. The process needs multiple sets of revisions consuming more time and contributing to the overall complexity of the project.
- Multilingual websites demand more configuration and implementation time.
- A staging environment is required to test newly added features prior to the website deployment during installation and setup. In addition to the same, theme designing expands the budget cost.
4. Timeframe:
Despite the amazing advantage of no license cost associated with Drupal, the development timeframes vary from project to project. The requirement for early or fastened delivery automatically increases the project cost. The number of developers and other professionals working on a project reduces overall time but enhances the price.
5. Development Resource:
Drupal is like a framework; selecting the right resource is crucial to any business venture. But I suggest opting for a Drupal development agency with a professional team working for your venture rather than depending upon one person for such a critical project.
The Drupal development agency having a diversified team, will work here. Usually, agencies have strategic plans for customised requirements. While choosing the development expert agency, look for the following specifications:
- Having a good track record of successful project deliveries
- Robust processes
- Quality professionals, i.e., developers, designers, testers, and the rest.
A comprehensive project requires a thorough professional to manage the deployment and server architecture. An experienced project manager ensures on-time deliveries while sticking to the budget.
Maintenance and Scaling Expenses
Drupal is a high-maintenance content management system requiring attention and time in the backend and regular installation of updates.
So, what is the solution?
Hire a Drupal expert and pay the maintenance cost.
Yes, apart from the substantial implementation cost, Drupal requires you to pay the maintenance cost too. Maintenance cost is an umbrella term covering migration and upgradation.
Suppose you are looking to migrate from Drupal 7 to 9, it includes the set up, staging, testing, and much more.
Final Words
Ideally, it is quite difficult to estimate the exact cost of Drupal development. But I am pretty hopeful that you can definitely calculate the rough or round-off figure for your Drupal development cost. Prior research would help; try to read the reviews, and you are good to go.
