drupal-vs-wordpress
16 Sep 2016

Drupal vs WordPress: Which one to choose for your business?

Creating a new online business always requires a good internet platform. For instance, it may be something like an online store, a message board or a content website.

If you don’t want to spend loads of money and time on creating such a web resource, you may always use a content management system (CMS) to help. The two giants that spring to mind are WordPress and Drupal.

Both of these platforms are extremely popular nowadays and may become a reasonable choice. However, there are several things that make these content management systems really differ.

Today, we’ll try to compare Drupal and WordPress to understand the main pros and cons of these CMS.

Why to Choose WordPress?

WordPress is extremely popular among the beginners, as it works especially well for blogs, e-commerce stores and small to medium websites. Nowadays, it’s the world’s most popular content management system that powers over 60 millions websites today.

The things that make WordPress so popular are the following:

  1. It’s easy to install.

Creating a website on the WordPress platform is a quick and pleasurable procedure. All in all, it will take you at least five minutes to make a brand new website.

  1. It’s customizable.

WordPress is truly rich in tools to customize your website. Being a free CMS, it often attracts loads of developers and third-party designers who make free of charge or relatively inexpensive plug-ins and themes for this content system, so creating or starting a blog that resembles a high-dollar custom website is quite possible here.

  1. It’s free.

You don’t need to pay anything for using WordPress. Isn’t it wonderful? Of course, yes, because the beginners who just try their hands at the online business for the first time always need something free or extremely cheap, and in these terms WordPress is the right thing to choose.

  1. It has a good community support.

Being one of the most popular CMS in the world, WordPress has millions of users who run or support it, so it will always be easy to find somebody to help you once you’ve faced certain problems with your WordPress website. For instance, you may register a support forum or a message board and post your question there.

However, WordPress isn’t ideal. It has its own cons:

  • Due to frequent updates, some plugins can’t be changed as quickly, and this causes certain problems in the website work.
  • You need knowledge of HTML and CSS to make some graphic changes.
  • A user should always activate the permalinks.
  • You have a slower experience while handling large volumes of content.
  • WordPress is vulnerable to various viruses, so you should be extremely cautious with plug-ins if you don’t want to loose your content or web pages.

Why to Choose Drupal?

Drupal is the second most popular content management system available today. It’ favored among higher education and government institutions, NGO’S, global enterprises and various smaller websites.

The beauty of this CMS is that it was especially developed for search engine optimization. Being safe, flexible and reliable, Drupal also has a large friendly responsive community.

Here’s where Drupal excels:

  1. It’s technically advanced.

Drupal is considered to be the best choice for those technical people who like to do everything by themselves, because it’s the most technically advanced CMS in the world.

  1. It has a good performance.

Drupal pages are less resource-intensive and usually require a cheaper server or hosting setup, that’s why they load more quickly and have faster responsive times than those made with WordPress.

  1. It’s customizable.

Drupal is easy to customize. It has tons of themes, plug-ins and other configurable tools. You also get an opportunity to edit the root files directly.

  1. It’s free.

The Drupal software is free of charge, so you may easily download and install it on your own hosting server.

Nevertheless, this CMS requires a technical expertise. Some premium themes and plug-ins are more expensive than those ones available on WordPress. You may also need some developer knowledge to complete certain upgrades.

Drupal vs WordPress

The main differences between Drupal and WordPress may be shown with the help of the following chart:

WordPress

Drupal

Popularity

140 million downloads

15 million downloads

Cost

Free Free

Free Themes

4K+

2K+

Free Themes 45K+

34K+

Top Sites Using the Platform Forbes, CNN, Sony

Fox, Verizon, The White House

Both Drupal and WordPress present a serious competition to each other since their ‘births’ in 2001 (Drupal) and 2003 (WordPress). They are open-source software packages; and each of them is developed and supported by thousands of developers and enthusiasts.

However, they are completely different on the user-end, and choosing a best CMS entirely depends on your business goals and how they’ll be served by the CMS you choose.

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