Easterseals Builds Foundation for Rapid Deployment of 40+ Drupal Sites on Pantheon

Easterseals is a national nonprofit that provides expert caregiving and support services across disabilities and stages of life, helping individuals and families live more independently. The organization’s national network of 70 Affiliates delivers programs to millions of people across the country. 

That national mission depends on a digital experience that feels consistent and dependable wherever people enter the network. In January 2025, Easterseals began moving its web portfolio from a proprietary platform to Drupal with Capellic, a digital strategy and implementation agency for non-profits. The rollout ultimately brought 40+ Drupal sites onto Pantheon. 

The change was more than a hosting move. Pantheon and Capellic enabled Easterseals with a common digital foundation for national and Affiliate sites. Following a complete architectural revamp of its web portfolio, the organization saw search-engine traffic increase by 400%, a sharp signal of how much changed beneath its organization’s digital experience.

Success like this takes a village, and Pantheon has been an important partner, providing solid technical expertise and ensuring our tech stack is highly performant.”

— Sam Johnson, Sr. Director, Digital Technology, Easterseals

Challenge: Modernize Without Disrupting Local Teams

Easterseals had spent roughly 20 years working with a proprietary legacy CMS platform. Over time, the environment created vendor lock-in, constrained budget flexibility, and left the team with limited visibility into how the system was performing or why problems occurred. The platform was also approaching end of life, which the platform provider accelerated by eight months.

That compressed the timeline for a transformation that already had a broad scope: a national website, Affiliate sites, legacy URL structures, and a federated content model managed by many people. The migration ultimately required coordination across 40 Affiliates and about 150 content managers, alongside a small internal digital team.

Easterseals did not want to reproduce the old operating model on a new host. The goal was a more stable, enterprise-ready Drupal foundation with stronger security controls, clearer deployment practices, and a shared structure that could support local Affiliate needs without making every audience learn a different website.

Solution: Migrate in Phases, Keep the Mission Moving

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Easterseals and Capellic treated the work as both a platform migration and a people-focused change-management effort.

Keep the Transition Moving

The rollout moved through four phases. Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN provided domain masking during the transition from legacy subfolder URLs to subdomains. This allowed the national experience to move forward while some Affiliates remained on the previous system.

Give Affiliates a Working Starting Point

Pantheon’s Multidev environments helped Capellic build a starter-site minimum viable product early in the process. The team created a sandbox, shaped the content model, and gave Affiliates a practical training environment instead of a blank site. Affiliates could see real content in representative content types before launch.

Replace Ad Hoc requests with a repeatable lifecycle

The teams moved to a sprint-based product lifecycle for prioritization, review, coordination, and ongoing improvement. The process supported a large, distributed content operation while helping the teams stay close to Drupal core.

Create a common experience without removing local relevance

The resulting web platform, which the team dubbed NextGen, established a common experience strategy, navigation model, and content architecture across all the websites. For audiences, that meant a more familiar experience from one Easterseals location to the next. For the brand team, it created a stronger foundation for accessibility, content governance, and consistent design.

Results

Fast performance that holds up under pressure

By optimizing caching and serving more requests from the edge, Easterseals and Capellic achieved a cache-hit ratio of 99% or higher. This protected backend performance during bot-traffic spikes while supporting an approximately 60-millisecond time to first byte, said Stephen Musgrave, Co-founder and Lead Technologist at Capellic.

For Easterseals, the technical improvement had a human purpose: helping people on mobile devices and slower connections reach services quickly.

This is a great part about the Pantheon infrastructure. The fact that we can get slammed by bots, and we are not that concerned because everything’s being served from the edge.”

— Stephen Musgrave, Co-founder and Lead Technologist, Capellic

Measurable improvements in quality and discoverability

Easterseals saw immediate improvements after the NextGen platform launched. Johnson reported that Siteimprove scores were outperforming the previous platform and industry standards:

• Accessibility score increased 13%.
• Quality Assurance score increased 50%.
• SEO score increased 18%.

Easier publishing and a more unified brand experience

The new platform also helped Easterseals establish a more unified digital brand experience. A common experience strategy and information architecture made it easier for people to find services and resources without relearning the interface at every location. The migration allowed the team to remove outdated content, improve formatting consistency, and build accessibility into the platform strategy, content structure, and quality-assurance process.

The ease of use on the backend has made a considerable difference, allowing us to publish content easier and faster.”

— Yolanda Green, Director of Digital Marketing, Easterseals

A foundation for national consistency and local services

The larger result is a digital foundation that can serve both sides of its mission: a recognizable national brand and locally relevant Affiliate services. The organization can keep improving the experience without returning to the inflexible operating model that held the portfolio back. Following the relaunch, Easterseals and Capellic received three Web Excellence Awards and two w3Awards.

Pantheon has been a great partner. And it’s been a game changer for us to have support staff. With Pantheon, the first person you’re interacting with already knows what they’re talking about.”

— Sam Johnson, Sr. Director, Digital Technology, Easterseals