Our new Drupal Starter Site: a better way to build

Accelerate and optimise with the P+S Drupal Starter Site  

At P+S, we’ve spent over 15 years delivering enterprise Drupal solutions. We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the painfully slow. That’s why we created the P+S Drupal Starter Site – a modern, headless, editor-friendly solution that gets you to market faster than ever.

What is Drupal — and what is it great at?

Drupal is one of the most powerful content management systems (CMS) available today. It’s trusted by governments, global enterprises, and mission-critical websites to manage:

• Structured content with complex relationships
• Multilingual experiences (localisation)
• Granular user permissions and workflows
• Custom business logic and integrations

Unlike many SaaS-based platforms, Drupal gives you complete control:

• No limitations on content types, users, or API calls
• Host it wherever you want – on-prem, in the cloud, or via a managed provider
• You fully own your site and data, with no risk of vendor lock-in or price creep

And thanks to its modular architecture, Drupal isn’t just for websites. It can power e-commerce, employee, customer or partner portals, learning platforms, and more – all from the same backend.

“We’ve gone ahead and created a custom Drupal distribution that changes EVERYTHING. It's a production-ready Drupal backend, preconfigured in alignment with best practice. Content structures, SEO tools, and accessibility are all baked in and ready to go.”

The common downsides

Despite its power, Drupal has long had two major drawbacks:

• It can take a long time to set up, especially compared to platforms like WordPress or Webflow.
• The content editing experience is not always intuitive enough for marketing or non-technical teams.

Many organisations end up trading control and flexibility for a quicker launch and better editorial UX elsewhere – even if it means compromising in the long term.

Why go headless?

A traditional content management system (CMS) bundles two things together: the backend where you create and manage your content, and the frontend – the design that displays it to visitors. Everything comes as one package.

When everything is bundled together, making changes becomes difficult and expensive.Want to redesign your website? You might need to overhaul your entire system. Want to create a mobile app using your existing content? You'll likely need to start from scratch. Need faster loading times? You're limited by what the whole system can handle.

A headless CMS separates content management from website design. You still have a user-friendly interface to create and organise your content, but the content isn't tied to any specific website design.

Instead, your content is made available through an API. This gives us the opportunity to match our clients with the best possible solution that delivers all the benefits of Drupal, along with design, flexibility and usability that rivals any other CMS.

Introducing the P+S Drupal Starter Site

We’ve gone ahead and created a custom Drupal distribution that changes EVERYTHING. It's a production-ready Drupal backend, preconfigured in alignment with best practice. Content structures, SEO tools, and accessibility are all baked in and ready to go. This means it solves most of your needs right out of the box.

• It ships with a Next.js frontend, delivering blazingly fast performance and modern flexibility.
• It includes a drag-and-drop page builder, empowering content teams without the need to call in the big guns (developers like me).

In short: an enterprise-ready, headless Drupal solution that’s as quick to launch as a WordPress site, but far more powerful.

Resolving Drupal’s traditional shortcomings

Our starter site is designed to eliminate the two biggest historical issues:

• Slow setup time: we’ve handled all the groundwork: configuration, content models, integrations, and templating.
• Unfriendly admin UI: we’ve introduced thoughtful UX enhancements throughout the admin, including logical field groupings, clear labels and help text, live visual indicators for content, style previews, and built-in SEO guidance.

We care as much about your editor experience as your end-user experience.

Why we chose Next.js for the frontend

Next.js gives us everything we want in a modern frontend stack:

It’s built for speed

Next.js helps your website load incredibly fast. And that’s important; faster pages mean a better user experience and can lead to more conversions.

It’s optimised for SEO

Next.js is built to help your content get found on Google. It gives you the tools to rank well in search engines, which is essential for attracting the right audience.

It offers enhanced security

Since the CMS backend is decoupled and not publicly exposed like traditional CMS systems, it’s far less vulnerable to direct attacks.

It delivers stunning animations

From subtle transitions to full-screen motion graphics, Next.js handles complex animations with ease. The kind of high-impact visuals that turn heads and boost engagement.

It's highly scalable

Whether you’re launching a single marketing site or a multi-brand, multi-region platform, Next.js scales beautifully both in architecture and in performance.

It’s made for multi-channel experiences

By going headless, we can deliver content not just to the web, but to mobile apps, digital kiosks, voice assistants, AI agents, and more — all from a single source of truth.

For B2B marketing sites, it means fast load times, a flexible design system, and future-proof technology.

The problem with traditional headless Drupal

Despite the advantages list above, headless Drupal often comes at the cost of the editor experience.

• No frontend previews out of the box
• No way for editors to build landing pages easily
• Requires frontend devs for layout or content structure changes
• Editors feel disconnected from what they're publishing

How P+S solves the problem

We’ve created the headless Drupal CMS we all want, need and deserve:

• Drag-and-drop page builder: giving editors full layout control
• Built in frontend preview: see exactly what you’re publishing
• Pre-built components and layout templates: so content teams can move fast

It’s time to empower your team and future-proof your stack with complete control – and faster than ever.

To learn more about how the P+S Starter Site can transform your next digital project and explore all your CMS options, get in touch: marketing@proctorsgroup.com