Drupal website support for Exide Group
Multiple improvements, refactors, and new features on an existing Drupal website
Exide Technologies is a leading battery manufacturer for the industrial and automotive markets. This international company handles the design and development of advanced energy storage solutions. Their batteries power various machines like heavy-duty vehicles, boats, and cars. They also provide services related to their products, such as battery charging.
Exidegroup.com is a large website with multiple languages and country-specific information, many integrations, and functionalities. Due to internal restructuring, Exide Group was looking for a new agency to maintain its website targeted towards EMEA markets. They wanted to find an agile partner who would help them maintain the website and move it from where it was to where they wanted it to be. They searched for a company that knew Drupal very well, was flexible, and could also move fast. This is how we joined this project.
Challenge
The Exide Group’s website was primarily created on a very early alpha version of Drupal 8. It had multiple issues with legacy code and wasn't using the latest available mechanisms that are now standard for Drupal websites. One of the many issues it caused was that the new features took a lot of time to add, and it was difficult to test and deliver them or apply security patches without errors and regressions.
Solution
After an initial onboarding and review, we recommended multiple improvements and refactors. Then we performed the tasks such as:
- removing legacy code,
- moving alterations of modules and Drupal core to proper hooks and preprocesses,
- updating modules,
- creating proper development and testing environments,
- introducing Composer and moving the website to a continuous integration workflow.
These changes created an environment in which we can deliver new functionality very fast but still maintain quality and avoid regressions.
Result
Thanks to the changes we made in the first phase of the project, we can now predictably deliver new features and changes. Exidegroup.com became a stable modern website.
Examples of delivered features
SEO improvements
After a restructure, content on the Exidegroup.com website contained many links to nonexistent pages, unexpected redirects, and other SEO issues. We automatically created a list of issues to repair. Using it, we handled the activities like:
- fixing all broken and redirecting links,
- reviving the previously lost content,
- adding redirects where links were leading to pages that no longer existed,
- configuring the sitemap to handle multiple languages and country pages correctly.
Corporate identity update
When Exide Group updated its corporate identity, the website had to follow. We implemented a new design very quickly, bringing the website to its current look and feel.
Migration of country websites to the Exide platform
We helped migrate several old country websites built on legacy technologies to the Exidegroup.com platform. This included the creation of landing pages and management of redirects of old URLs to new structures.
Dealer search
We created and implemented functionality that helps Exide customers search for dealers and distributors in various countries. Thanks to this functionality, customers can easily find places to buy Exide products. Check out the dealer search in practice.
Installation instructions
Exide Group manufactures various types of batteries. Each battery type comes with a manual on how to install it. We helped bring the installation manuals online so that they can be now searched and downloaded by users.
Educational content
Exide has a lot of educational content on batteries - how they work and behave under various conditions etc. Our team designed the online versions of these manuals and helped bring these online.
Multiple other fixes and enhancements
Apart from the above, we improved many aspects of the website, making it more modern, faster, and more SEO friendly.
The Exide Group website live
