Case Study: Design & Architecture firm HDR achieves global, blazing-fast website performance with Pantheon

Design & Architecture Firm HDR Finds Global Performance with Drupal 8 on Pantheon

HDR, a 100‑year‑old engineering, architecture, and construction firm with over 10,000 employees in 225 locations, needed to modernize its flagship website. Its decade‑old Drupal 6 site had mobile rendering issues, hard‑coded navigation, and years of layered legacy code that made adding pages or campaign sites difficult and created a heavy maintenance burden.

HDR teamed with Drupal agency Chapter Three to rebuild the site in Drupal 8 on Pantheon, using Pantheon’s dev-test-live workflow and Global CDN. The new platform simplified development and editing, dramatically improved global page loads (Australia dropped from 8s to 1.21s), added code-level monitoring via New Relic, and enabled easy location/language rollouts so marketing can focus on content instead of infrastructure.

HDR

Nancy Gruwell

VP of Marketing