With the Drupal 7 end-of-life date looming, Contactum wanted to upgrade their systems before the EOL date to maintain their optimum performance, and security. Using the Migrate Drupal and Migrate Upgrade modules, we seamlessly imported all the content from their existing site.

The transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 can seem like a vast change. In reality, the site now has all the benefits of Drupal 9, but still feels like the same site. With the same structured content based system, Contactum now has a more advanced site that works similarly to their previous site. Their processes and editing functions work the same way, but with even better performance, keyboard navigation and accessibility.

Contactum used the Drupal Feeds module in their Drupal 7 site to import their product information management data.

While upgrading their site to Drupal 9, we optimised the way this module worked so that product fields are automatically filled with the product information management data. Updating product information is now more streamlined and efficient, saving website editors an enormous amount of time.

The existing search engine on the Contactum site worked well already, but was only achieving results from exact searches. We implemented Elasticsearch on the site to allow for much more advanced search results, improving the customers’ user experience.

Elasticsearch works great with Drupal sites and is really flexible enough to allow for future improvements and features. We implemented Elasticsearch using the Elasticsearch Connector module to integrate seamlessly on the site.

The site wasn’t previously optimised to work across mobile devices, which Contactum recognised as a lost opportunity to boost sales.

We enabled the site to be responsive across all devices, including mobile. The responsive design means a wider customer base can now access the site and product information easily from their phone, without the need for a laptop or desktop computer.

One of Contactum’s great strengths is having hundreds of distributors of their products around the UK. Contactum wanted to optimise their distributor map function, which would only show results when searching for the exact distributor location. We implemented the function to allow the search results to show distributors within a 5-mile radius of a location.

Using the GeoLocation module and the Location Migration module, we migrated the Distributor map to the Drupal 9 site and made significant improvements on its functions for a better user experience.