Drupal 8 is the leading open source CMS for ambitious digital experiences. With support for decoupled architecture, Drupal 8 development tools enable digital teams to build almost any kind of customer experience across a wide range of channels and devices. But as organizations constantly press their marketers and developers to deliver digital assets more quickly, Drupal 8 development teams need solutions that can accelerate the pace of development to bring new experiences online faster.

Acquia can help – with a suite of solutions for building Drupal sites more quickly and managing them more easily to create more customer moments that matter.

Accelerating Drupal 8 development

Acquia is an open digital experience platform made for Drupal, providing tools that lets Drupal 8 development teams build, run and optimize sites more easily and more quickly.

Acquia offers two solutions to accelerate Drupal 8 development.

• Acquia Lightning is a Drupal 8 distribution that provides site builders and editorial teams with the tools to build better sites faster. Providing preselected modules and configurations out of the box, Lightning packages a curated set of capabilities that are designed to streamline page layouts, media management, content creation and workflow. When starting Drupal 8 development projects with Lightning, developers can hit the ground running instead of spending weeks selecting modules and getting familiar with custom frameworks.
• Acquia Site Studio is a Drupal add-on that can speed Drupal 8 development build times by as much as 4x and empower non-developers to be 100% brand compliant. As a low-code interface, Site Studio allows non-technical users to build and manage sites without needing to write code. Users can quickly drag, drop, arrange and nest content to create immersive page layouts based on design patterns defined by Drupal 8 development and design teams.

Hosting for Drupal 8 development

Acquia Cloud is a managed Drupal hosting solution that combines tools for Drupal 8 development, world-class support and enterprise-grade security, enabling developers to build, test, optimize and scale hundreds of Drupal experiences on a single platform. As a Drupal hosting provider, Acquia enables development teams to focus on innovation, rather than managing and maintaining their Drupal-optimized platform. Acquia maintains a 99.95% uptime SLA as well as a rich set of tools and features for monitoring, debugging and optimizing performance. And with Acquia Cloud, organizations can accelerate Drupal 8 development with easy-to-use tools, automated workflows and Dev-Stage-Prod environments out of the box.

A guide to Drupal 8 development

As the foremost expert in Drupal and a leading contributor to the Drupal project, Acquia offers a Drupal 8 guide packed with details about the major improvements in the most recent release. Designed for content authors and editors as well as site builders, developers, theme- and front-end developers, and module and back-end developers, Acquia’s Ultimate Guide for Drupal 8 provides an overview of the new capabilities for more easily making page layouts, working with media management and delivering decoupled web experiences. 

Why choose Acquia for Drupal 8 development?

No one knows Drupal better than Acquia. Our founder is also the creator of Drupal, providing our engineers with unique insight into how Drupal 8 works and enabling us to be among the leading contributors helping to improve and extend the open source Drupal platform.

Acquia’s software and services were created around Drupal to give enterprises more tools for building, operating and optimizing websites, apps and other digital experiences. With Acquia, Drupal 8 development teams can more easily develop decoupled or standalone applications with tools that enable continuous delivery, integration, monitoring, alerting and support across both Drupal and Node.js.

FAQs: how to speed Drupal 8 development?

What is Drupal 8?

Drupal 8 is an open source content management system that is widely used to build and manage websites, applications and other digital experiences. The Drupal platform is the CMS of choice for millions of people and organizations around the world and has helped to create digital experiences for many of the world’s most recognized brands.

What are solutions to speed Drupal 8 development?

To enable Drupal 8 development teams to bring digital experiences online faster, Acquia Lightning – a Drupal 8 distribution – provides a curated set of capabilities that enable developers to create enterprise-level experiences faster using a common framework and streamlined authoring experiences to cut development time by up to 30%.