Home to 12,000 students, North Dakota State University (NDSU) embarked on a bold initiative to modernize its online presence. With nearly 300 legacy workspaces spread across TYPO3 and outdated Drupal platforms, NDSU needed a solution that would unify its digital footprint, enhance performance and empower content creators. 

Partnering with Four Kitchens and leveraging Pantheon’s platform, NDSU successfully migrated its sprawling web ecosystem into a scalable and secure Drupal environment in less than a year.

“We went with Drupal CMS for ease of use. From a technical standpoint, we wanted a platform and partner that could truly engineer a great experience for our authors. At the time, we had more than 400 people contributing content, so it was critical to build intuitive, user-friendly tools that promoted consistency across the entire site. Four Kitchens and Pantheon made it happen.”

Lindsay Condry, Director of Web Engagement and Content Strategy at NDSU

From TYPO3 to Drupal

NDSU’s digital ecosystem was fragmented. While some marketing pages had already migrated to Drupal, most campus sites remained on TYPO3. Hosted on-premises, these sites had inconsistent branding, outdated technology, and operational inefficiencies. The university’s MarComm team began taking a leading role in web management, alongside IT, while assuming oversight of roughly 300 workspaces.

Before Pantheon, NDSU’s Drupal sites were hosted on Acquia. While functional, the Acquia environment presented several limitations:

• A lack of responsiveness and partnership support leading to delays in addressing technical issues.
• Expensive and limited CDN capabilities for required customizations. 

“We had a complex on-premises infrastructure, which included a reverse proxy system that allowed us to split the domain between Acquia and in-house hosting. In order to get rid of that, we needed an advanced CDN capability. That’s why we went with Pantheon.” 

Justin Johnson, Senior Web Developer

Migration Strategy and Content Solutions

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NDSU partnered closely with Four Kitchens to develop a comprehensive migration and hosting strategy on Pantheon, as well as a website relaunch. The team audited 35,000 pages and relaunched the sites with under 11,000. 

“The innovative ‘Web Principals’ initiative was launched to drive NDSU’s digital transformation. We worked closely with these campus-wide champions to steer adoption and foster a sense of community ownership. As a result, these power users helped train hundreds of content authors and smoothed a transition to a new platform.”

Megan Bygness Bradley, Four Kitchens’ Senior Project Manager

Key elements of the successful relaunch included:

Managed hosting and CDN

Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN enabled NDSU to eliminate its on-premises reverse proxy system, delivering a secure, globally distributed platform that could scale with traffic and content needs. The platform’s edge caching and performance optimization minimized bottlenecks, ensuring rapid page loads across the university’s websites.

Progressive Migration Strategy

The migration plan consolidated nearly 300 TYPO3 workspaces and several legacy Drupal instances into a single Drupal platform. Four Kitchens and the NDSU MarComm team developed a phased approach using domain masking, allowing the university to gradually transition content without disrupting users. AI-assisted frontend modernization converted two outdated Angular applications into lean, vanilla JavaScript, reducing complexity and long-term technical debt.

Empowering Content Creators

With hundreds of content editors across campus, NDSU implemented sophisticated, user-friendly authoring tools using Drupal’s Layout Paragraphs module. Editors gained intuitive drag-and-drop control over hundreds of flexible layouts, enabling faster, more confident content publishing.

Security and Compliance

Pantheon’s platform enhanced security across NDSU’s sites, protecting sensitive data while meeting accessibility and compliance standards. Automated updates, secure environments, and robust user management provided confidence for both marketing and IT teams.

“Pantheon has given us a lot more visibility and control. The new dashboard makes it easy to manage updates and handle tasks like cleaning up redirects without having to loop in extra support, which saves time. The Multidev environments have also been a big win — they let us spin up isolated test branches for specific functionality or fixes without disrupting other work. It’s been a really smooth, efficient setup, especially with how Four Kitchens integrated everything.”

Justin Johnson, Senior Web Developer at NDSU

Results: speed, visibility, efficiency

The launch of the new NDSU.edu marked a significant milestone in the university’s digital transformation.

With Pantheon as the foundation, NDSU achieved exceptional site performance and reliability. Internal pages now boast Lighthouse scores as high as 99, and the homepage loads in just half a second — a remarkable improvement that keeps visitors engaged and reduces bounce rates. These performance gains were paired with near-perfect accessibility and SEO scores, ensuring NDSU’s content is both inclusive and easily discoverable by prospective students.

For marketing teams, the result is faster content creation, consistent branding, and a more agile digital presence that better reflects the energy of the NDSU community.