Around 80% of the world's top 100 universities run Drupal on at least one of their websites. Yale hosts more than 1,000 departmental sites on YaleSites, and University College London runs over 500 microsites from a single installation. In this article we look at which platform each of ten universities runs, at what scale, and the reasons they give for the decision.
A university web project is rarely about one website. Faculties, institutes, research centres, labs and student groups all want pages of their own, and central IT has to meet those requests while holding the brand, the security posture and the accessibility standard together. Most leading institutions solved this with a central platform built on Drupal. Below we go through those platforms by name, by the number of sites they carry and by the reasoning behind each choice.
How many universities use Drupal?
Two figures circulate on this question. Drupal's own education sector page points to 71% of the world's top 100 universities. Research published by The Drop Times puts the share at 80%.
The gap comes from what is being counted. The lower figure looks mainly at the primary institutional website. The higher figure asks whether Drupal appears anywhere in the estate, whether that is the main site, a faculty site or a research centre site. The second measure sits closer to how universities actually work, because Drupal usually runs there as a platform carrying hundreds of subsites rather than as a single website.
10 universities using Drupal and the reasons behind each choice
Each institution below started from a different problem. Read the platform names, the scale and the stated reasons together and it becomes clear where Drupal earns its place in higher education.
1. Yale University: YaleSites
YaleSites, the university's central publishing platform, carries more than 1,000 academic and administrative department sites. It launched in 2010 and moved from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 in January 2025. The new version introduced a design system built on reusable blocks and templates. A tool called Editoria11y flags accessibility problems while an editor is still writing and explains how to fix them. Yale's reasoning is less technical than organisational. The university wants brand consistency held centrally while a department administrator with no web background can still update a page.
2. University of Oxford: main site and the Mosaic platform
Oxford's main website runs on Drupal 11. Alongside it, the Oxford Mosaic platform built by IT Services carries over 1,000 sites for departments, colleges and administrative units. Mosaic has an explicit purpose. Staff with no technical background can build a site that meets institutional standards and works on any device. The platform integrates with the university's single sign-on system, so site management rights are granted through existing campus accounts. Because Mosaic sits on Drupal 7, the university is currently working through a move to a next-generation platform.
3. University College London: more than 500 microsites
UCL's web estate consists of over 500 microsites, all running on one Drupal installation. During the move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 the university built a custom control panel to make that estate manageable. The panel syncs automatically as the microsite list changes, and new sites launch from ready-made templates. UCL's priority was to keep maintenance in-house after the migration rather than depend on an external team for routine work.
4. Harvard University: HarvardSites
Harvard runs department, school and research centre sites through the HarvardSites platform. OpenScholar, a distribution built for academic profile pages, publication lists and research projects, came out of the same ecosystem and was released as open source for other institutions to use. Harvard illustrates a model where universities do not simply adopt Drupal but extend it for their own needs and give the work back.
5. Stanford University: Stanford Sites
Stanford Sites is a free self-service platform open to members of the university. Departments, centres, research groups, conferences and student organisations can create an unlimited number of sites. The platform runs on the current version of Drupal, with new features, theme updates and bug fixes shipping every eight to ten weeks. Every site on the platform receives those updates at no cost. Access control connects to the campus identity system through SAML 2.0.
6. Princeton University: Princeton Site Builder
Princeton Site Builder runs on Drupal 10 and serves departments, programmes, centres, labs and faculty. Personal pages and course sites sit outside its scope, and the university offers separate options for those. The platform team owns the core code, the hosting and platform performance, while site owners own content and design choices. That split is what holds central security and departmental freedom in balance. Restoring a site from recent nightly backups is part of the published service definition.
7. Kuwait University: one portal in Arabic and English
Kuwait University consolidated more than 50 subsites scattered across an ageing Oracle system into a single Drupal 10 portal. The project moved colleges, departments and research centres onto one content structure. Because Arabic reads right to left, interface and content layout were designed separately for each language. Information is now updated once and changes everywhere it appears. For anyone dealing with multilingual university portals, this is a useful reference point.
8. North Dakota State University: 300 sites into one platform
NDSU brought roughly 300 legacy sites spread across different systems onto a single Drupal platform under the banner "One NDSU, One Voice." More than 150 content editors were trained during the transition. The visual identity that had drifted apart between units came back together, and publishing time dropped. The project shows that consolidation at university scale is as much a training and process exercise as a technical one.
9. University of Manitoba: a rebuild led by accessibility
The University of Manitoba put accessibility first when it rebuilt its website on Drupal. An accessibility score that had been sitting in the 45 to 55 range rose to 93 out of 100 on the new site. Mobile use also climbed to 44% of total traffic. Treating accessibility as a design decision rather than a layer added afterwards gives institutions facing tighter compliance obligations a route they can follow.
10. University of Oregon Libraries: an integration example
The University of Oregon Libraries rebuilt on Drupal and wired the site directly into its room booking and events calendar system. Opening hours and event listings are no longer maintained by hand; they arrive from the connected system. The site meets WCAG 2.2 AA. Academic libraries have to pull catalogues, study space bookings and research guides into one interface, and this example shows how that integration layer gets built.
What these universities have in common
The institutions above sit in different countries, at different scales and on different budgets. The same four needs sit behind every one of their decisions.
- Running hundreds of subsites from one installation: A security patch is applied once and propagates across every connected site. We covered how that model is built in managing multiple university sites with Drupal.
- Tying permissions to roles rather than people: A faculty member, a department administrator, a communications officer and a student assistant work inside the same system with different limits.
- Single sign-on through campus identity: Users carry no separate password, and granting or revoking access happens centrally.
- Accessibility that arrives with the platform: Heading hierarchy, keyboard navigation and focus states are defined in core rather than bolted on afterwards.
How the web estate feeds into global rankings
There is a further reason these institutions treat the web estate as one system rather than a collection of separate sites. Webometrics, the Ranking Web of Universities produced by the Cybermetrics Lab at the Spanish National Research Council, covers around 20,000 institutions worldwide and scores them on web-based indicators rather than surveys. Visibility carries the heaviest weight and is calculated from the external networks linking back to an institution's pages, with the remaining weight split between citations of top-cited researchers and the share of papers in the most cited tier of their disciplines.
The practical implication for a web team is about where content lives. Faculty profiles, research output, repositories and departmental news accumulate links to whichever domain hosts them. An estate spread across third-party platforms and unmanaged subdomains scatters that signal, while a consolidated platform concentrates it. Ranking position should not drive a platform decision on its own, but it is one of the reasons a fragmented estate carries a cost that is easy to overlook.
Multilingual publishing for a global student body
International recruitment has made the second language a structural requirement rather than a nice addition. Programme pages, admission requirements, research output and event announcements all need to exist in more than one language, and they need to stay in step as they change.
Drupal handles this in core. Support covers over 110 languages, and interface translation is separated from content translation, so a department can publish a news item in one language without waiting for the whole site to be localised. Right-to-left languages are handled at the layout level, which is what made the Kuwait University portal above workable in Arabic and English at the same time.
The practical gain is editorial rather than technical. When translation lives inside the same content structure, an editor sees which pages have a translation and which do not. Without that, the second language quietly falls behind the first and stops being trustworthy for the audience it was built for.
Accessibility and compliance in 2026
Accessibility has moved from preference to obligation on both sides of the Atlantic, and the timelines are now specific enough to plan against.
In the United States the schedule changed this year. On 20 April 2026 the Department of Justice issued an interim final rule extending ADA Title II compliance deadlines by one year. Public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more now have until 26 April 2027, and smaller entities and special district governments until 26 April 2028. The technical standard did not change: WCAG 2.1 Level AA still applies. The Department explained the extension by noting it had overestimated how quickly covered entities could staff and resource the work. The underlying obligation to provide accessible digital services remains in force throughout.
In the European Union the European Accessibility Act took effect in June 2025, with EN 301 549 as the reference standard for public bodies. In practice that also points to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Alongside accessibility sits student data. FERPA governs how student records are handled in the United States, and while no content management system makes an institution compliant on its own, granular role-based permissions, field-level access control and audit logging are the technical foundation those workflows rest on. Solving both accessibility and permissions at platform level is what keeps them from becoming a separate project for every departmental site.
Deciding whether Drupal fits your institution
Drupal is not the automatic answer for every institution. A unit publishing a single brochure site with a handful of pages and infrequent updates is well served by something lighter. We compared what each approach offers in which scenario in Drupal vs WordPress for universities. The cost of Drupal also does not sit in the licence line; it sits in setup and maintenance. You need a team or a partner who will build the platform and keep it running.
The equation reverses as the site count grows. At ten sites the difference is hard to feel. At a hundred, a central platform becomes the only workable option.
The other point is about sequence. What the examples above share is that they settled governance before technology. Once it is clear which unit can edit what, how far a design can be changed and what process a new site request goes through, the build itself gets easier. If you want to see the cost side in numbers, our TCO analysis of open-source versus licensed systems sets out a comparison.
Where to go next with your university web platform
A list of universities using Drupal is not an argument on its own. What matters is that these institutions ran into a similar problem and arrived at a similar structure. Hundreds of departmental sites, publishing in more than one language, integration with campus systems and a tightening accessibility obligation together make a central platform difficult to avoid.
The Drupal platforms that the Drupal4edu team at Drupart has built for institutions such as Sabanci University, Yildiz Technical University and Isik University are exactly the kind of structure that supports these multi-unit, multilingual scenarios. You can read more about how we approach this work on our Drupal for education page.
Frequently asked questions about universities using Drupal
Which universities use Drupal?
Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford and University College London all run their web estates on central platforms built with Drupal. Most of those platforms are known by name: YaleSites, HarvardSites, Stanford Sites, Princeton Site Builder and Oxford Mosaic. The list runs well beyond the best-known names. Kuwait University, North Dakota State University, the University of Manitoba and the University of Oregon Libraries all use Drupal at different scales, across North America, the United Kingdom, continental Europe and the Middle East.
What percentage of top universities use Drupal?
Two figures are quoted for the world's top 100 universities. Drupal's own education page says 71%, while research from The Drop Times says 80%. The difference comes from method. The lower number counts primary institutional websites, while the higher number asks whether Drupal appears anywhere in the estate. Because universities typically use Drupal as a platform carrying hundreds of subsites rather than as a single website, the second measure sits closer to the real picture.
Why do universities choose Drupal over WordPress?
The decision usually tracks site count. For one brochure site or a blog, WordPress is quick and practical. Once hundreds of departmental sites are in play, central governance, granular role definitions and running many sites from one installation become the deciding factors, and Drupal was designed for that scenario. Having multilingual publishing and accessibility in core also reduces plugin dependency. For smaller units, WordPress remains a reasonable choice.
Is Drupal free for university websites?
Drupal is open source and carries no licence fee. An institution pays nothing for the software regardless of how many sites it runs. Costs appear in hosting, implementation, design and maintenance. That structure works in your favour as the estate grows, compared with systems priced per user or per site. The trade-off is that you need a team or a partner to build and maintain the platform, so total cost of ownership is worth modelling from the start.
How many sites can a university run on one Drupal installation?
There is no technical ceiling; server resources and the management model decide it. Among the examples above, UCL runs over 500 microsites, Oxford Mosaic carries more than 1,000 sites and YaleSites hosts over 1,000 departmental sites on a single platform. At that scale the deciding factor is governance rather than software. When the process for requesting a new site, the available templates and the limits of design customisation are defined up front, the platform stays manageable as it grows.