Drupal developer in Birmingham: custom builds, upgrades, and rescues

We build, upgrade, and look after custom Drupal sites for healthcare, non-profit, B2B, and lifestyle organizations, and for agencies that need a Drupal team they can count on. We're based in Chelsea, just south of Birmingham. We've been building websites since 1997 and working in Drupal for 15 years.

Tell us about your Drupal project

A Drupal specialist close to home

When you search for a Drupal developer in Birmingham, you mostly find LinkedIn profiles and national agencies. Drupal is one of the two platforms we build on every day (WordPress is the other). We know where its strengths are and where it fights you.

Here's what that means for you:

You work with people who know Drupal well. We've worked in Drupal for 15 years, as part of more than 200 websites launched since 1997.
You're working with someone in the same time zone. Our studio is in Chelsea, Alabama, and we serve Birmingham, Montgomery, and clients beyond Alabama. Our hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Central.
We have opinions, and we'll share them. If a contributed module will save you money, we'll tell you. If it'll cost you during the next upgrade, we'll tell you that too.

What we do in Drupal

Custom Drupal builds

We build content models, editorial workflows, and custom themes around how your team publishes. Editors get a site that's easy to use, and developers get one they can maintain. That means configuration in version control, clean custom modules, and nothing left to "please don't touch." We train your editors at handoff, too.

Upgrades and Drupal 7 migrations

Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025. If you're still running it, you're running unsupported software. We move sites to current Drupal, rebuild what needs rebuilding, and carry your content over intact. We also handle upgrades between modern Drupal versions.

Rescue and cleanup

Inherited a Drupal site nobody wants to touch? We'll audit the codebase, modules, and hosting setup, explain what we find in plain English, and give you a realistic plan to fix it.

Performance

Fast sites come from good decisions in the build, not plugins added afterward. Image handling is one example: we set up Drupal's image style pipelines so every image is resized and served in the right format automatically. Here's how we approach it.

Accessibility built in

We write our own accessibility tooling, including the open-source dd_wcag checker. Our Drupal themes and components are built to meet WCAG 2.1 AA from the start, and we aim for WCAG 2.2, so accessibility isn't left for the end of the project. More on our WCAG accessibility services, or start with a free WCAG audit.

Integrations

Drupal works well as the hub that ties your other systems together. We've connected Drupal to Salesforce and Zoho CRM, and sites to email and event platforms like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Zoho Campaigns, and Splash. See API integrations.

Hosting, workflow, and the boring stuff that keeps launches calm

Our preferred host for Drupal is Pantheon, and we're a Pantheon partner. Every change moves through development, testing, and live environments before it reaches your visitors, with daily backups along the way. A bad deploy shouldn't cost you a week, and with this setup it doesn't. We also work on Acquia, and on AWS and Azure through DevPanel.

We build our own open-source developer tools (the dd_* projects) to make that workflow faster and more predictable. More on Pantheon hosting and DevOps.

After launch, our care plans start with managed quarterly CMS updates, and you can add more, like a bucket of hours for ongoing fixes, so your site doesn't drift out of date.

Who we build Drupal sites for

Healthcare: organizations of every size, where accuracy, accessibility, and security can't be afterthoughts. We keep patient data out of the CMS and make sure your tech stack uses tools on HIPAA-eligible plans with a signed BAA, like Formstack or Jotform, that integrate with your site. See healthcare web development.
Outreach and non-profit: content-heavy sites with many editors and limited budgets. See non-profit web development.
B2B: product and service sites that connect to sales and marketing systems.
Lifestyle: brands that need a site that looks good and stays fast.
Agencies: white-label Drupal development for agencies that need extra capacity or Drupal depth, under NDA when needed. See agency partners.

Case study: rescuing and upgrading a franchise-development site. A national franchise brand's Drupal 9 site came to us undocumented, with broken staging and no way to sync environments. We took two months to document and stabilize it, rebuilt four environments with automated deployments, upgraded it to Drupal 10 with zero data loss, and built a two-way Salesforce integration, plus the email templates and SEO cleanup around it. Two years on, it's still running cleanly.

Case study: a multi-version Drupal migration for a regional healthcare provider. A regional healthcare provider's site was two major Drupal versions behind, and bringing it up to date meant moving through each one in the right order without taking care information offline. We handled all of the development: we sequenced the migration, mapped clearer user flows for each audience, directed the design, and rebuilt the site as a mobile-friendly Drupal platform built to accessibility standards from the start. The whole migration ran with zero downtime, and afterward traffic rose about 20% and time on site about 40%. Read the full case study

Drupal packages

Starter: from $15,000

Hosting on Pantheon (third-party service), with three environments for fast development and continuous integration
Drupal with rolling updates
Fully responsive, mobile-first design
A streamlined authoring experience, with component-based layouts and a page builder
Built-in site search
Integrated forms (third-party service)
Events through EventCalendarApp (third-party service)
User-level access control: decide what each person can see and do
Group-level access control: set permissions for whole teams or departments at once
4 custom templates
Up to 50 pages

Growth: from $30,000

Everything in Starter, plus:

Smarter search that matches word variations (stem-based processing), with weighted results and auto-populated suggestions
Events (third-party platform chosen for your needs)
Group-level publishing control: an editorial workflow, so content is reviewed and approved before it goes live
6 to 8 custom templates
Up to 150 pages

Every project is scoped individually, and non-profits get 20% off. Tell us what you're planning and we'll recommend a starting point.

Drupal or WordPress?

We build both, so we don't need to push either one. Drupal is usually the better fit for complex content structures, many editors with different permissions, multilingual sites, or deep integrations. WordPress is often the better fit for simpler sites that need to launch quickly and be easy to manage. If you're not sure, ask. We'll give you a straight answer. See WordPress development.

FAQ

No. We're in Chelsea, Alabama, and work with clients across the Birmingham area, Montgomery, and beyond. Most of our work happens remotely. Whether we meet in person depends on where you are and the scope of the project.

We're a small, home-based studio. Our team scales as needed per project, so you get senior-level Drupal experience without the overhead of a large agency.

Yes. We start by reviewing the code, modules, and hosting, then tell you plainly what's solid, what's risky, and what we'd do first. We can't take responsibility for problems in code we didn't write, but we'll make sure you know about them.

Drupal 7 has been end of life since January 2025, which means no more official security updates from the Drupal project. Moving to current Drupal is usually a rebuild, not a quick upgrade, and it's a good chance to clean up your content and fix accessibility. Get in touch and we'll scope it.

No. Pantheon is our first choice, and we're a Pantheon partner, because the workflow and backups are excellent for Drupal. We also work on Acquia, and on AWS and Azure through DevPanel.

Our Drupal packages start at $15,000 for Starter and $30,000 for Growth. Where your project lands depends on scope, so tell us what you need and we'll give you a clear estimate. Non-profits get 20% off.

Let's talk about your Drupal site

Building something new, stuck on an old version, or tired of a site nobody wants to touch? Tell us about it. You'll hear back from a developer, not a sales team.

ldnddev is a home-based studio in Chelsea, Alabama. We work with clients in Birmingham, Montgomery, and beyond. Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Central.

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