Once you have built your Drupal Lite website and are ready to send visitors to your site, follow the steps below to launch. To understand all stages of a Drupal Lite site and where the launch process fits, please see Drupal Lite: Understand Your Website Lifecycle. If you have a Drupal Enterprise or Hybrid website, see Drupal Enterprise: Launch Process for Production Site instead of this article.
Note: This article applies to Drupal Lite sites provisioned after January 27th, 2026.
Test your website for accessibility
You are responsible for ensuring that your website complies with University policy and legal requirements around digital accessibility.
- Test and track your website accessibility with Pope Tech.
- Pope Tech can crawl and scan your development site to help you find and address accessibility issues prior to launch.
- While the Editoria11y tool within Drupal can help you find and fix issues as you add content to your website, a comprehensive scan with Pope Tech is still warranted before launching your site.
Submit a Drupal Service Request
Once your website meets accessibility requirements, use the Drupal Service Request form to submit a ticket to the OIT Drupal team. Please allow 5-7 business days for the site launch to be completed. If your request is time sensitive, please indicate this in the Additional Information section in the request form.
- Click the Request Service button in the top right
- Under Select the type of service being requested, choose Request support for an existing site. Additional form fields will appear.
- Enter your website domain name in the What is your site URL? required field.
- You can enter either your website development url (e.g. mysite.dev.umn.edu) or the url that will be used with your production site.
- Select Site Launch as the work requested.
- If there are any special circumstances that the Drupal service team should know, note these in the Additional Information text field.
- Click Submit.
Preview Your Website
As a part of the process, the OIT Drupal team will run an automated tool to make sure your website is set up correctly for launch. They will let you know via the ticket once this is complete, and ask you to preview the site afterward to give final approval to proceed with your launch.
Post-Launch: Update Pope Tech to use your production URL
Once your website has launched, update your website settings in Pope Tech to use your production domain. Your development URL (e.g. mysite.dev.umn.edu) will no longer work once your site has launched. This step is essential in order to continue using Pope Tech to monitor the accessibility of your website as you make content changes over time.
- Log in and navigate to your website in Pope Tech
- Click the Edit website settings button. A modal window will appear.
- Update the Base URL field to use your production domain. Your situation may be different, but there are two typical naming conventions depending on if your website is using a College subdomain:
- "https://mysite.dev.umn.edu" becomes "https://mysite.umn.edu"
- "https://mysite-cfans.dev.umn.edu" becomes "https://mysite.cfans.umn.edu"
- Click the Save button. The modal window will close.
- Click the Start button to initial a crawl and scan to ensure that everything has been updated successfully.
Questions
- If you have questions about the website launch process, please contact [email protected] to reach the Drupal Support Team.
- If you have questions about Pope Tech, please email [email protected] to reach the UMN Pope Tech support team.
- If you have website accessibility questions, please see the Get Accessibility Help page on the Office for Digital Accessibility (ODA) website.