Sector(s)
Exide Technologies is a global manufacturer of batteries for industrial and automotive markets. Exidegroup.com is a large, multilingual website serving EMEA audiences with country-specific content, integrations, and product information. After internal restructuring, the organization needed a new Drupal partner to stabilize the platform, remove legacy technical debt, and resume predictable delivery of features and design updates.
About the project
After an agency transition, Exide Group needed exidegroup.com to become a maintainable Drupal platform again. The site powers brand and product content, dealer discovery, and downloadable installation manuals across many languages and country paths for EMEA markets.
Challenge
The platform faced several interconnected issues:
- The codebase originated on an early Drupal 8 alpha release, with legacy customizations that bypassed standard APIs.
- Security updates and new features often triggered regressions, slowing delivery.
- A content restructure left broken links, unexpected redirects, and sitemap gaps across multilingual country pages.
- A corporate identity refresh required a coordinated design update on tight timelines.
- Several older country websites still ran on legacy stacks outside the main platform.
- Dealer search, product manuals, and educational content had to remain reliable for customers in multiple regions.
Solutions
Agency takeover and technical audit
A structured onboarding review mapped legacy alterations to Drupal core and contrib modules. Custom logic moved into proper hooks, preprocess functions, and theme layers so future updates could run without fragile overrides.
Composer, environments, and continuous integration
The project adopted Composer for dependency management and established separate development and testing environments. A continuous integration workflow supports module updates, automated checks, and safer releases to production.
Legacy cleanup and module maintenance
Obsolete code paths were removed and contrib modules were brought up to supported versions. The cleanup restored a baseline where security patches and feature work could ship with fewer side effects.
Multilingual SEO repair
An automated audit listed broken internal links, redirect chains, and missing content references after the restructure. Editors revived valuable pages where possible. Redirect rules handled retired URLs, and the XML sitemap was configured to reflect language variants and country-specific paths correctly.
Corporate identity and responsive theme
When Exide Group updated its corporate identity, the Drupal theme was refreshed to match new brand guidelines. Layouts were validated on desktop and mobile so regional sites shared a consistent look and feel.
Country website consolidation
Legacy country sites were migrated onto the exidegroup.com platform using shared content types and landing page templates. Permanent redirects preserved inbound links and search equity from retired domains and URL patterns.
Dealer and distributor search
A location-aware search experience helps customers find dealers and distributors by country. Results connect product buyers with local sales channels through structured location data managed in Drupal.
Product documentation and educational content
Installation manuals for multiple battery types were published as searchable, downloadable resources. Educational articles explaining battery behavior under different conditions were structured for online reading alongside product pages.
Result
Exidegroup.com operates as a stable, modern Drupal site with predictable release cycles after the first modernization phase. SEO issues from the content restructure were addressed systematically. The refreshed brand is live across EMEA paths, legacy country properties feed into the main platform, and customers can locate dealers and access manuals online.
Examples of implemented features:
- Dealer and distributor search filtered by country and region.
- Searchable and downloadable installation manuals by battery type.
- Educational battery content integrated with product information.
- Multilingual redirect and XML sitemap management for country paths.
- Responsive corporate identity rollout across regional sites.
- CI-backed deployment from dedicated dev and test environments.
Why Drupal was chosen
The Exide Group website was already built on Drupal, but on an early alpha-era codebase that did not follow current best practices. Replacing the CMS would have meant rebuilding multilingual country sites, dealer tools, and document libraries from scratch. Staying on Drupal allowed the team to refactor incrementally: modernize hooks and preprocesses, adopt Composer and CI, and extend existing content types rather than migrate data to a new stack.
Drupal's translation, routing, and redirect APIs support multi-country publishing from one installation, which matched how the business organizes regional content.
