The City of San Diego: A Digital Transformation with Pantheon

The City of San Diego's flagship website, sandiego.gov, is a critical resource for residents, providing essential services, updates and news. But before 2020, managing these sites was anything but seamless. The City’s web team was stuck in an outdated system, first relying on a static HTML structure before moving to Drupal in 2015. 

Even with that upgrade, some aspects of site management were still limited by their third-party hosting provider. Code deployments, for example, had to go through an outside team, which could slow down the process. The City’s web team wanted more flexibility and direct control over how and when changes went live. They also sought a more resilient infrastructure to reduce the impact of occasional server downtime and ensure residents could always access vital information.

Upgrading and Gaining Control

Image

In 2020, the City seized the opportunity to upgrade its platform and issued a request for proposal (RFP) to solicit bids for the web project. San Diego needed a platform that offered reliability, speed, and most importantly, control. After discovering that many high-visibility websites, including a U.S. presidential campaign, were hosted on Pantheon, the web team knew they had found their solution.

The migration to Pantheon marked a turning point. The City’s web team could now deploy code instantly, without jumping through third-party hoops. 

In the past, a code deployment would take a couple of days. Now, there’s greater control of code deployments and local development, and it’s one of the reasons we love being on Pantheon.  It just made my tech guys really happy switching over to Pantheon.” 

- Ron Vazquez, Web Services Manager

When an unprecedented storm hit, they were able to deploy a new emergency alert the same day — something that would have previously taken days to implement. Uptime also improved significantly, going from an unreliable standard to an impressive "four nines" (99.99%).

"Pantheon has been solid, and it has dramatically improved our response time for code changes. When we had a major flood, we needed to add an emergency alert message — something we hadn’t planned for because flooding of that scale wasn’t common. With Pantheon, we were able to implement it the same day. Before, it would have taken days." 

- Ron Vazquez, Web Services Manager 

Discovering new possibilities

Building on their positive experience with Pantheon, the team also created a new Drupal website, insidesandiego.org, to deliver news and city updates efficiently. With Pantheon’s powerful developer tools, the team quickly realized they had more than just better uptime — they had an entire suite of features that enhanced their workflow:

• Upstreams simplify code deployments across both websites, ensuring consistency.
• Advanced Global CDN boosts page speed and reliability, keeping the user experience smooth.
• Image optimization made the sites faster and more efficient without extra effort.
• Multidev helps the team work on new features at the same time.

These weren’t just minor improvements — they changed the way the team worked. "Pantheon provided solutions to the problems we didn’t even realize we had," said Vazquez.

Support that delivers

Beyond the technology, Pantheon’s support has been a game-changer. Pantheon’s Customer Success Manager (CSM) doesn’t just respond to issues — he actively looks out for them, shared Vazquez. During a site outage, real-time chat updates kept the team informed, eliminating the all-too-familiar frustration of waiting in the dark.

Pantheon’s CSM also helps optimize the site proactively, flagging areas for improvement and making sure the City is using Pantheon’s full range of capabilities. "He tells us when we’re not taking advantage of something, and it’s like — yeah, we should be doing that!" said Vazquez.

Impact and the road ahead

Since moving to Pantheon, the City of San Diego has seen measurable improvements:

• Lightning-fast response times: what once took days now takes minutes.
• Unmatched uptime: keeping critical information available 24/7.
• Empowered developers: eliminating unnecessary red tape and allowing the team to move faster.
• A better experience for city departments: from the communications team to Drupal editors, everyone benefits from the smoother workflow.

With a platform built for high performance and a support team that’s truly invested, San Diego’s web team is no longer just managing websites – they’re building a better digital experience for their residents every day.

We consistently receive great feedback from our internal customers. Whenever they run into an issue, my team can respond and apply fixes almost immediately. That level of speed and efficiency is only possible because of Pantheon. The platform gives us the control and flexibility we need to keep everything running smoothly."
 

- Ron Vazquez, Web Services Manager.