Your site is on a version nobody supports. You need an argument, not a contractor.
You already know the platform is the problem. What you do not have is one page with a date, a number and a reason, written so it survives being forwarded to a finance committee without you rewriting it first.
The free check gives you that page
Send the web address. Back comes the version your site runs, the date security updates for it stopped, one fixed price, and the whole thing on a single page made to be forwarded. No call to book. If the answer is that your site is fine, that is the answer you get.
The three things that actually worry you
Hundreds of papers cite links into your site
Every faculty page, every staff profile, every PDF of a prospectus is referenced from somewhere you do not control: journals, other universities, a reading list from 2018. Breaking those is not an inconvenience, it is a decade of citations pointing at a 404. Every existing address is carried across and kept working. That is not a promise made at the end of the project, it is planned before the first page moves.
Your rankings, and the question about them afterwards
Rankings follow addresses. Keeping the addresses intact is what protects the traffic, and it is designed at the start rather than repaired once somebody notices in month three. The written plan says which addresses move and where, before you commit.
Editors across twelve faculties, at twelve levels of skill
The people who add news and update course pages should recognise what they see. Where something has genuinely changed, they get shown it — one session, plus a short written guide they can keep. The alternative is that every faculty change becomes a ticket to you, which is the situation you are trying to leave.
The four things that stop this happening
| What blocks it | What that means here |
|---|---|
| The budget year is closed | Most of these conversations happen in spring, for money that appears in autumn. The check and the written plan cost nothing and are valid when the budget opens — get the number now, spend it later. There is a button to be reminded rather than chased. |
| Procurement wants three quotes | The price is one fixed figure for the whole project, not an hourly rate, which is the form procurement can actually put in a document. You will get something comparable against the other two. |
| “We have our own IT department” | They almost certainly do, and they are almost certainly busy with the student system. This is a fixed piece of work with an end date, not a permanent role, and your IT keeps the hosting and the access. |
| “You are one person — what if you disappear” | A fair question and the one I would ask. The work happens in your repository on your infrastructure, in commits you own, documented as it goes. My contribution history is public on drupal.org and has been for a decade. Nothing about the project lives only in my head. |
What it costs
A university or faculty site usually lands in the middle band: several kinds of page, news, events, staff, documents, working forms, often more than one language.
| Size | Typical of | Price | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | A single school or institute, up to ~300 pages | €8,000–12,000 | 5–7 weeks |
| Standard | A faculty or a small university, 300–2,000 pages | €15,000–30,000 | 8–12 weeks |
| Large | Multiple languages, subdomains per faculty, connected systems | from €30,000 | 14–20 weeks |
If your site is on Drupal 10 it needs an update, not a move, and that starts at €1,500. Which of the two you need is exactly what the free check tells you.
On accessibility, since it is usually in the same budget line
A move onto current Drupal does not make a site compliant with EN 301 549 or WCAG on its own, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. What it does is remove the excuse: on a supported version the accessibility work is ordinary front-end work rather than a fight with a theme nobody can modify. If you have an audit outstanding, say so in the check and the plan will say which of its findings the move closes by itself and which stay as separate work.
Budget closed until the autumn? That is the usual blocker here, and it is not a refusal — it is a date. The brief is built for exactly that: a published deadline, one figure and the risk in plain words, on one page.
Not a university? The same offer, written for the sector you are in:
Non-profits and foundations · Agencies needing a Drupal subcontractor · Everyone else