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Nowadays, every business is heading towards the online world with a huge consideration to deliver streamlined user experiences. To achieve so, one crucial step is to find out the right content management system (CMS). At present, there are multiple CMSs available that are readily available to set up online portals.
Here, I shall take you through a comparative analysis of two popular CMSs, i.e., Drupal and WordPress.
These two are gaining popularity day-by-day. Although it is quite tough to say which CMS is best-suited for your business (as the need and scope of every project is different), however, I shall compare Drupal and WordPress based on six critical elements that you should not ignore.
Before you select any CMS, it is important to scrutinize it based on some essential features like usability, ease of use, and others. Below, I have performed the same to put you at ease while determining the apt solution.
Let’s begin!
To start with, we will undergo a quick analysis of the usage of both WordPress and Drupal over the last 3 years. If you are deciding between these two CMSs, the usage metrics should matter. Because the popularity of a platform decides its user-friendliness and durability which can cater to different individuals and organizations.
Although there is a slight dip in the popularity of WordPress from 2017 to 2020, however, it has managed to stay above average in comparison to Drupal that has shown little or zero improvements in its usage between the same period.
Probing further, the total market share for WordPress is 50.0% with over 27,000,00 live websites using WordPress globally. On the contrary, Drupal contributes 1.5% of the total market share of CMSs with over 562,000 live websites across the world. Apart from these, below is given a detailed breakdown of CMS market share amongst all the trending CMS platforms.
All-in-all, the usage and popularity of WordPress is promising and is continuously following an upward trend.
Another important aspect that you need to consider while choosing the best CMS is the ease of learning, developing, and maintaining your online platforms.
The learning curve is important from the perspective of the development team as every platform is different from its language, and the developers require time to learn and practice the same. When we talk about the language, both WordPress and Drupal are built over PHP, which is a commonly used language.
WordPress is easier to use, and it offers a wide range of free plug-ins and themes that makes it easy for even non-developers to develop websites. If you are looking for building a basic blog site, there is no need to hire any developer as you can do it on your own with WordPress, that too in no time.
On the other hand, Drupal is complex in structure, and you need to install and reform Drupal modules if you wish to build an advanced website of enterprise-grade. Its core structure and taxonomies take a while to get used to. For a beginner, no one would recommend Drupal to you, as in the past years, it has made it very clear that only an expert user can exploit it for complex work environments or project needs. If you have a large authenticated user base, complex customization requirements, or integrations, Drupal is the best choice.
SEO or search engine optimization is an important process for every website holder as it allows you to get noticed amongst potential web users. If you fail to achieve effective SEO tweaks on your website, there are great chances of failure. Both WordPress and Drupal support best SEO techniques covering three important factors, i.e., Page load times, CDNs or content delivery networks, Schema.org implementation.
Starting with page load times, many powerful search engines like Google evaluate a website’s performance and ranking based on its loading times. For WordPress, you can easily utilize its caching plugins like WP Fastest Cache that covers image optimization and a CDN. On the other hand, Drupal’s default caching features are quite powerful when it comes to speed optimization. And, its in-built SEO features provide it an added advantage over WordPress that needs additional plugins for caching.
The developers can add schemas to the template files or views of both WordPress and Drupal. For CDNs, you can always have them in many of the hosting platforms’ base subscriptions. There is no need to worry much about its inclusion.
Although we can not simply rely on these three factors for good SEO, they are the basics that every CMS platform needs to have. Here, both WordPress and Drupal are winners.
The world of technology is dynamic, and there always remains a need for modifying and customizing your website with new features and functionalities periodically. To support the same, your web development framework needs to be flexible so that it can be extended.
Both Drupal modules and WordPress themes provide you a plethora of options to customize your website. Still, Drupal is believed to be a better CMS as it offers a higher degree of flexibility when it comes to extensibility.
Talking about WordPress, it is backed by a plethora of plugins and themes (both free and premium) that anyone can use to stretch its basic capacity. Be it eCommerce, news, educational, financial, and other business verticals, WordPress provides you the right combination of themes and plugins.
You can also extend the functionality of Drupal with its supportive extensions and modules. Although the number of these extensions is way less than WordPress. But it doesn’t mean that there are barriers to Drupal customization. You can perform advanced customization with its built-in capabilities of altering content taxonomy, creating custom content types, and more. It is noteworthy that this process involves a steeper learning curve and requires a lot of effort to bring out something unique with Drupal.
Having said that, as a non-developer, WordPress is easy to customize and extend. But for developers, it is easy to reach Drupal’s heart and tweak its core to present something unique and more powerful.
When we talk about a readily available platform or any framework it becomes imperative to have strong community support. Because it helps us to share experiences and insights about the product. Moreover, it allows us to understand the entire ecosystem around the product.
There remain fair chances of cutting off with the development team after the website is delivered. So, if the CMS that you have utilized is offering dedicated community support from its developers, things become easier for you in the long run while customizing, extending, or any other performance-related tweaks.
Both WordPress and Drupal have enthusiastic and vibrant open source communities that are great assets. If we compare in-depth, the Drupal community is well-organized and stronger in comparison to the WordPress community worldwide.
The development cost is another major factor concerning business owners. Some clients need a basic setup so they don’t need to invest a lot of money in the development process. They can simply look for a free-to-use software and get things done.
Although both WordPress and Drupal are open-source and easy to use, the development cost for WordPress is less than Drupal because it offers one-click and cost-effective hosting plans that don’t even require a professional setup.
On the other hand, web development with Drupal costs you higher as you need to seek an expert’s assistance if you wish to exploit its core to work in your favor. Although Drupal has invested in PHP frameworks such as Symfony that are more common in use amongst PHP developers. Still, there is a long way to go while beating WordPress on the scale of cost-effectiveness.
In this blog, I have tried to come up with the best conclusions on the topic of Drupal vs WordPress. Apart from these factors, there are other essentials like security, etc. that vary from business to business, i.e., it depends on the nature of your business (whether it involves financial or personal information sharing and storing).
To find the best business solution, you can consult our team of experts who are available 24X7 for free business consultation and recommendations.
