The person behind Steady Drupal

Hi, I'm Luke.

Steady Drupal is one person — me — and that's deliberate. The quote you get comes from the developer who'll do the work. The person answering your email at 9pm when something looks wrong is the person who built the thing. There's no account manager, no junior it gets handed to, no gap between what was promised and what gets delivered, because the promising and the delivering are done by the same bloke.

I've been building Drupal sites since 2006. Drupal 5, if you were around for it. Nineteen years later I'm still here, and most of that time has been spent on one particular kind of job: taking organisations off an ageing PHP platform and onto something modern that can actually be maintained.

Some of the places that work has happened:

• University of Cambridge, where I'm currently a senior developer on a platform hosting more than 700 university websites — including the migration of over 500 legacy Drupal 7 sites to Drupal 11. When I say I've seen your migration problem before, I mean I've probably seen it several hundred times.
• King's College, Cambridge, where I spent three years rebuilding the College website from the ground up — a site that has to stay standing while tens of thousands of people around the world tune in for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.
• MTR, where I rebuilt Drupal 7 trade-in platforms handling thousands of transactions a day for partners including Samsung, with the security requirements you'd expect when phones and payments are involved.
• A Cambridge school, where I built a parent portal on Drupal with React apps embedded in it — and untangled a long-postponed run of Drupal 8 and 9 upgrades sitting on top of a 10 GB CRM database.

The full history is on LinkedIn if you want it. The short version: I've spent nearly two decades on exactly the kind of work Steady Drupal sells, mostly for organisations that can't afford for their website to fall over.

Why fixed prices

Because hourly billing on migrations rewards the wrong thing. The messier the job turns out to be, the more the developer earns — which is a strange incentive to hand someone. I scope the work up front, give you one number, and the risk of it taking longer sits with me, where it belongs. I can afford to do that because after a few hundred of these, not much surprises me any more.

Why old Drupal specifically

Because it's where small organisations are genuinely stuck. Drupal 7 stopped getting security fixes in January 2025. Drupal 8 and 9 went before it. The agencies that built those sites have often moved on, retrained in WordPress, or want £20k to talk about a rebuild. Meanwhile the site still works, so it's nobody's emergency — right up until it is.

That gap is what Steady Drupal exists to close: a senior developer, a fixed price a charity or a school can actually budget for, and a migration where your content, files and URLs come out the other side intact.

The bit that isn't about Drupal

Outside of work I follow GT endurance racing (24hrs of Le Mans, mostly), and I build sci-fi Lego with my son, who is seven and has strong opinions about my designs. If your migration call drifts into either topic, I won't mind.