Standard Insurance
Six years maintaining three Drupal platforms — microsite, corporate, and headless — with 5 major version upgrades and zero-downtime deployments.
Highlights
Hello World has served as Standard Insurance’s dedicated development partner for six years, maintaining and evolving three distinct Drupal platforms — delivering 5 major Drupal version upgrades and building comprehensive automated testing suites that enable zero-downtime deployments across all properties.
Services
Ongoing Drupal Development
Platform Maintenance & Upgrades
Automated Testing & CI/CD
Headless Architecture
Technical Strategy
Overview
The Standard is a leading provider of financial protection products and services, including group and individual disability insurance, group life, dental, and vision insurance, and retirement plans. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, they’ve been protecting people for over a century.
Since 2020, Hello World has partnered with The Standard’s digital team to maintain, modernize, and evolve three web platforms that serve fundamentally different purposes — from their public-facing corporate site to microsite experiences to a fully headless content platform powering multiple mobile applications. Each platform has its own architecture, frontend approach, and deployment cadence, requiring deep cross-stack expertise and disciplined engineering practices.
The Challenge
Three Platforms. Three Architectures. One Standard of Quality.
The Standard’s digital footprint spans three platforms, each with distinct technical requirements and user bases:
The Microsite Platform (Drupal 11 + Angular) — Originally built on Drupal 7, this platform powers targeted marketing microsites with rich interactive experiences built in Angular. It has been continuously upgraded through every major Drupal release, requiring careful coordination between the CMS backend and the decoupled Angular frontends.
The Corporate Website (Drupal 10 + Web Components) — The main standard.com experience, built on Drupal 10 with a modern web component-based frontend. This site serves insurance professionals, employers, and consumers seeking benefits information, requiring strong performance, accessibility compliance, and content flexibility.
The Headless Content Platform (Drupal 10) — A fully headless Drupal instance serving structured content to multiple native mobile applications. Upgraded from Drupal 8 through 10, this platform demands rock-solid API stability since any breaking change could affect end users across iOS and Android simultaneously.
Keeping three platforms current across major Drupal versions — while each uses different frontend technologies and deployment patterns — requires engineering rigor that doesn’t cut corners.
Our Approach
Hello World acts as a seamless extension of The Standard’s engineering team. Our approach centers on three pillars:
Disciplined Upgrades
Across six years we’ve executed 5 major Drupal version upgrades spanning three platforms. Each upgrade required migrating custom modules, ensuring frontend compatibility (Angular, Web Components, and headless API consumers), and validating that no regressions slipped through. We plan upgrades methodically — auditing contrib module readiness, identifying custom code dependencies, and staging migrations in isolated environments before touching production.
Automated Testing That Earns Confidence
We built comprehensive automated testing suites tailored to each platform’s architecture. The headless platform’s test suite validates API contract stability across every endpoint, ensuring mobile apps won’t break. The microsite platform’s tests exercise Angular component integration with Drupal’s content API. The corporate site’s suite covers end-to-end user flows, accessibility checks, and performance benchmarks. These suites run on every pull request and deployment, giving both teams confidence that releases won’t introduce surprises.
Zero-Downtime Deployments
With three platforms serving insurance customers who depend on access to policy information, claims tools, and benefits details, downtime isn’t an option. Our CI/CD pipelines handle database updates, cache clearing, and configuration syncs as part of an automated deployment flow that keeps every platform available throughout the process.
Results
Over six years of partnership, we’ve delivered measurable reliability and progress:
- 5 major Drupal upgrades completed across three platforms (Drupal 7→8→9→10→11) without service disruption
- Zero-downtime deployments as standard practice across all three properties
- 3 distinct test suites tailored to each platform’s architecture — API contract testing, Angular integration, and end-to-end flows
- 6-year partnership built on trust, clear communication, and consistent delivery
- Cross-stack expertise spanning Drupal, Angular, Web Components, headless APIs, and CI/CD infrastructure