KeyQualitiesinaDrupalDevelopmentServiceProvider

Drupal talent is scarcer than WordPress talent in most Canadian markets, and the gap between a competent Drupal shop and a mediocre one shows up fast in production. Here's what we tell prospective clients to actually check before signing a contract with any Drupal development provider, including us.

Ask for their module audit process, not just their portfolio

Any agency can show you finished sites. Fewer can walk you through how they decide which of the 40,000+ contrib modules on drupal.org to use for a given feature, and how they evaluate module health before recommending it. A provider worth hiring should be able to name specific criteria: last commit date, number of open critical issues, whether the maintainer has committed to a Drupal 10/11 port, and download/usage statistics relative to alternatives. If a provider's answer is "we use whatever gets the feature done fastest," that's a red flag for long-term maintainability.

Check their approach to custom module development

Drupal's real strength is its plugin architecture and dependency injection system, and providers who understand it write custom modules that are testable, upgradeable, and don't fight the framework. Ask to see a code sample or a description of how they structure a custom module: do they use Drupal's Entity API properly, or do they write raw SQL queries that bypass Drupal's access control layer? The latter is a common shortcut that creates security and upgrade problems down the line.

Multisite and multilingual experience, if you need it

If you operate across provinces with bilingual requirements (a common need for federally regulated or Quebec-facing organizations), ask specifically about their experience with Drupal's core multilingual module suite (Content Translation, Interface Translation, Configuration Translation) versus third-party translation management integrations. This is a genuinely specialized skill set, and providers who've only built English-only sites often underestimate the config complexity multilingual content management adds.

Hosting and DevOps competency

Drupal performance depends heavily on server-level configuration: PHP-FPM tuning, OPcache configuration, Redis or Memcache for the cache backend, and a properly configured reverse proxy (Varnish is still common in Drupal deployments). A provider who only knows the CMS layer and hands off hosting to a generic shared host is setting you up for performance problems at scale. Ask what hosting stack they recommend and why, and whether they manage deployment pipelines (via GitLab CI, CircleCI, or similar) or expect you to FTP files manually.

Security patching cadence and communication

Drupal issues security advisories on a predictable release cycle (typically Wednesdays). Ask a prospective provider directly: what's your process when a critical security advisory drops? A competent provider has a documented SLA — for example, critical patches applied within 48 hours for managed clients — and proactively notifies you rather than waiting for you to ask.

Accessibility and compliance fluency

Drupal has strong built-in accessibility support (the Olivero and Claro themes are both built with WCAG 2.2 AA compliance as a baseline), but a provider still needs to preserve that when adding custom components. Ask whether they run automated accessibility testing (axe-core, WAVE) as part of their QA process, and whether they understand the practical difference between WCAG conformance and the broader AODA requirements that apply to Ontario-based organizations, or equivalent obligations elsewhere in Canada.

References from a similar-complexity project, not just any reference

A reference from a five-page brochure site tells you little if you're building a multisite intranet with 12,000 content items. Ask specifically for a reference client with comparable content volume, comparable multilingual or multisite needs, and comparable integration complexity (CRM, membership systems, payment processors).

We're happy to walk through our own answers to every question above on a discovery call, and we'd encourage you to ask the same of any other Drupal provider you're evaluating before committing budget.