How Do You Choose Between Drupal and WordPress for Your Next CMS Platform?

Getting a website is one of the first and most important steps for a business to make its digital presence. The website of an organization becomes its face in the digital world. You don’t want to take a chance while you are building such a crucial asset of the business. A responsive and easy-to-navigate website are the two most important parameters of a nicely built website. Many platforms exist in the market, and Drupal and WordPress are two of the most prominent ones. There is a lot of ongoing debate on Drupal vs WordPress. We have discussed in detail what will help you in choosing the best CMS for your project.

WordPress

WordPress is a free open-source content management system released in 2003. The ease to use WordPress to build and host a website is a major reason for its popularity even after almost two decades after its release. WordPress is used by 63.8% of all websites.

Drupal

Drupal was initially released in 2001, as a free open-source web content management system. It is used to create and manage different types of websites. Drupal is a powerful tool that efficiently handles complex projects.

Before getting into WordPress VS Drupal, let us first know the respective advantages that have placed among the top CMS.

WordPress Advantages

1. Large Community: With so many people choosing WordPress to build their websites, the support group is huge.

2. Lower development cost: WordPress is free to use, and there are a lot of free themes and plugins available to reduce the development cost.

3. Easy: It is easy to learn and use WordPress. Hosting with WordPress is also hassle-free.

4. SEO friendly: WordPress provides a lot of built-in tools to optimize the website and content.

Drupal Advantages

1. Multi-lingual: Drupal has multi-lingual functionality which allows you to build a website and manage content in different languages.

2. Complex Website: Drupal lets you build complex websites that need advanced technical expertise and tools.

3. User experience: Drupal with its layout builder and mobile responsiveness gives an enhanced user experience.

4. Scalability: The flexible API architecture lets the business expand at their convenience and Drupal is well equipped to handle a large volume of traffic coming with scalability.

Now coming to the question how do you choose between WordPress and Drupal as CMS for your website?

Let us find out the best CMS suitable for your project by comparing both CMS.

1. Ease of use

The ease of use of a platform impacts the development process and also the user experience.

Drupal

Drupal is a good choice while developing a relatively complex website that is expected to perform complex functions. There are technical skills required to build these functionalities and work with Drupal.

WordPress

WordPress is an easy platform to use build websites. The installation and configuration in the case of WordPress are relatively simple. One can use WordPress with no coding knowledge.

2. Performance

While browsing the internet, when you click on the website link and the loading time is more than 2 seconds the bounce-back chances are high. With such advancements in technology like the 5G network, users expect a fast and responsive website. The loading speed of the website also affects the search engine result of your website.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the common choices when building a complex website with many web pages. Websites build on Drupal are high performing and fast. Drupal provides powerful search functionality in the site, which otherwise is a problem in other platforms.

WordPress

One of the major problems with WordPress is speed. If the themes and plug-ins used while creating the website are not properly written it hampers the website’s performance and speed. It is not that this problem cannot be resolved, by following the best practices for performance.

3. SEO

The whole exercise of building a website is futile if the users are not able to locate your website. It is a crucial parameter when choosing a suitable platform for your website building. The website and its content both need to be optimized for the search engine.

Drupal

It requires technical assistance to update your website on Drupal. It is difficult to update on your own. Drupal was built keeping in mind the best SEO practices in mind, therefore Drupal has the best SEO tools on the platform.

WordPress

It is comparatively easier with WordPress to perform updates. The user does not need to have technical knowledge for updation, it is a simple process on the WordPress platform. WordPress also has access to the best SEO tools like AIOSEO and various other SEO tools.

4. Security

With the constant rise in the number of cyber attacks, businesses are incurring huge losses. While creating your website it is advisable to take a little extra precaution while choosing the technology stacks with high-end security features.

Drupal

It is a highly secure platform to build websites. There are many government websites based on Drupal which states the tight security of this platform. The exposure to threat is limited, the reason being less number of themes and plugins available for Drupal.

WordPress

WordPress is also a secure platform. The threat to security in WordPress vs. Drupal is high because of the outdated themes and plugins that compromise security. There are ways to enhance the security of websites built on WordPress.

5. Flexibility

Building a website with your chosen platform is not the end. The platform should provide flexibility to incorporate changes that may come during the development process or even after the project is completed. Let us compare both CMS platforms.

Drupal

Drupal allows you to customize as per your requirements. The platform enables you to customize with modules and extensions. Though Drupal provides great flexibility on its platform you might need the help of a developer to implement a lot of customization.

WordPress

WordPress has a good number of themes and plugins that allows you to customize simply. It is easy to use the themes and plugins and doesn’t require any technical skill.

Related: Top Reasons To Have A CMS For Your Website

6. E-commerce

Businesses are turning towards using their website to sell their products and services. After a while, you might feel the need to use the website as an e-commerce platform. While choosing the CMS platform it is essential to consider if the platform allows seamless integration of e-commerce platforms.

Drupal

Drupal allows one to easily manage an e-commerce website. It lets you integrate with some e-commerce plugins, that easily set up the online store for your business. Drupal also has a native e-commerce module that builds on the existing architecture of Drupal.

WordPress

WooCommerce is a popular WordPress plugin that adds e-commerce functionality to the CMS. Woocommerce is used by 2.67% of 1 million top e-commerce websites. WordPress gives the full range of features of an e-commerce platform.

Making the choice

There are a lot of similarities between Drupal and WordPress such as both use PHP language, and both provide the flexibility to customize as per the requirement. When it comes to choosing the CMS platform between WordPress and Drupal it would depend on the specifications of your project. If you are looking for a technology partner who can understand your specific business objectives and offer solutions accordingly, Contact us. We are an experienced company with skilled developers on our team, we would be happy to help you.