One Platform, Millions of Citizens: The Québec.ca Story

The Québec.ca website is the official online portal of the Gouvernement du Québec. Its central purpose is to provide residents, businesses, and visitors with access to information, public services, and administrative procedures.

It centralizes government resources so residents can easily access laws, programs, forms, and guidance in one location.

The objective was to centralize communication management under a single banner, Québec.ca, to offer a coherent, reliable, and unified image, while optimizing technological costs through resource pooling.

This project was not a backend mission system integration project, rather a communication and citizen experience standardization project.

For this project, the goals were outlined to place focus on the citizen experience. This entailed: 

• Total Communication Coherence (One Voice): The primary goal is to unify the Province’s voice. Québec.ca aims to offer a unique showcase where information is clear, easy to find, and consistent, regardless of which agency produces it.
• Rigorous Interface Standardization: The goal is to enforce strict visual and ergonomic standardization via the Government Design System. Whether a user is viewing an information page or accessing a transactional service, the interface and navigation must remain identical.
• Feedback-Driven Evolution: Beyond technology, the project aims to instill a culture of continuous improvement based on real user feedback (surveys, user tests, data analysis).
• Decentralized Production, Centralized Standards: Allowing for decentralized content creation by ministry experts (who know their programs best), while maintaining strong centralized governance that guarantees adherence to accessibility, writing, and design standards.
• Use open technologies and scalable architecture to support long-term evolution, minimize technical debt, and reduce total cost of ownership.

In order to accomplish this project, TYPO3 CMS was chosen as the trusted solution. Due to its ability to adapt to complex needs while sharing a unified system, TYPO3 was the CMS capable of handling a project of this scale, while meeting the needs of large organizations.

Québec.ca was developed primarily by an internal team, with cloud support from the external partner Toumoro, whose expertise played a key role. The platform’s technology is built through close collaboration between the government’s web development team and Toumoro.

Key technological components, delivered jointly by the government’s web development team and Toumoro, include:

• Infrastructure Engineering (DevOps): Implementation of a robust cloud infrastructure capable of redundancy and auto-scaling. Development of necessary extensions to link TYPO3 to AWS services and ensure data security.
• Government Design System Implementation: Rigorous integration of visual and ergonomic components (buttons, alerts, breadcrumbs, footers) into TYPO3. These components are "locked" to ensure all ministries respect the visual identity and accessibility standards (WCAG) without being able to "break" the design.
• Re-engineering and Content Strategy: A massive rewriting effort was undertaken before any migration. Content was simplified (Subject + Verb + Object), stripped of legal jargon, and structured to meet search intent (SEO).
• Custom Development: Over the 8 years of the project, we developed more than 75 extensions to meet various needs. Whether for additional backend management modules, bridges between Solr and CSVs to display data, or connecting web services and maps, the internal team solved every challenge presented to them.

TYPO3 served as the centralized governance, allowing for the Direction des communications numériques gouvernementales to maintain strict control over the Design System (templates, immovable components) while delegating content writing and updates to teams distributed across different ministries. TYPO3’s granular user rights management is essential here, as Québec.ca has over 350 registered content editors.

Known for its multisite and multilingual capabilities, TYPO3 natively handles the complexity of the multilingual content and the deep tree structure required to organize information for an entire government body. It ensures logical semantic URLs (e.g., folder/sub-folder/page), which is crucial for SEO—organic search represents over 60% of traffic to Québec.ca.

Québec.ca operates with technological independence due to TYPO3 providing an open source solution, meaning the government “owns” its expertise and avoids external vendor lock-in. The platform also provides security and long-term viability, due to TYPO3’s long-term support releases, open source transparency, and dedicated security team—making it a sustainable choice for public sector use.

Due to the large number of editors working within this installation, granular permissions and editorial workflows were achieved through TYPO3’s advanced permission system, supporting decentralized publishing while maintaining centralized governance and content quality control.

The implementation of TYPO3 for Québec.ca has transformed the platform into a high-performance digital public service serving almost 200 million pageviews annually.

Over 60% of traffic comes from search engines, reflecting effective content and semantic URLs, while streamlined UX features like breadcrumbs and a high-performance search enhance navigation. 

User satisfaction is high, supported by analysis of 400,000+ annual comments, and the platform has proven resilient during crises, handling traffic spikes without interruption. The Design System ensures consistent, familiar experiences across all site sections, reducing cognitive load and improving task success.

More than a website, Québec.ca has become a resilient digital public service — fast, trusted, and built around citizens’ real needs.