Drupal and WordPress are very popular content management systems for website development. They are both built on PHP + MySQL, they are both free, they are almost of the same age (Drupal was “born” in 2001 and WordPress in 2003). However, they have significant differences in the ease of use, functionality, flexibility and more. Accordingly, each CMS has a passionate army of its own fans.
Rivals in different categories
Like rivals in any other field, Drupal and WordPress are competing for acknowledgement. In the movie industry, they could be both nominated for Oscars. Which one is the winner? Well, the thing is that Drupal and WordPress actually compete in different categories.
WordPress is perfect for simple sites with minimum content types. It started as a blogging platform. Thanks to a growing amount of plugins, WordPress is now used for other formats of websites. Simple, intuitively understandable even for people without specific development skills, WordPress offers a lot of prepackaged solutions enabling almost anyone to make a website.
However, if you want a more functional, advanced or complex website with out-of-the-box solutions, Drupal should be the CMS of your choice. As a more powerful platform, it requires more technical expertise to work with. The good news is that Drupal becomes easier to use with the release of each new version.
We could compare WordPress to a simple puzzle that is easy to use, but the range of possible combinations is limited. While Drupal is a more complicated puzzle requiring more skills but allowing to create truly unique combinations. Now let’s go into detail and make a comparison of the key aspects in which WordPress and Drupal differ.
Security: who to entrust your precious information?
If you are concerned about possible hacking attacks or the protection of confidential information on your website, Drupal is your best choice. If it has extensive enterprise-level security and provides its users with security reports. That’s one of the reasons why government websites like whitehouse.gov are built on Drupal. WordPress' websites are easier for hackers to attack. By targeting some vulnerabilities inside plugins, hackers can even wipe entire websites out. To deal with this problem, you need to update WordPress plugins as often as possible.
SEO: analyzing the opinion of the mysterious Mr. Google
Actually, Google doesn’t make any difference between the platforms on which websites are built. Both Drupal and WordPress are designed to create SEO-friendly sites. But the mysterious Mr. Google has a special love, and that is useful and unique content. And here’s where Drupal offers more opportunities than WordPress. It easily handles hundreds of thousands of content pages, enabling you to get to the higher positions.
Performance and speed always matter
Drupal is very efficient in handling lots of users and lots of page views even on the largest websites without the influence on the performance. Drupal is very robust out-of-the box, while WordPress performance can be enhanced by additional plugins.
Drupal website pages usually have a better loading speed and faster response time than those built on WordPress. But a lot depends on the used plugins and features. The efficient performance of Drupal websites is supported by built-in caching, as well as scalable databases. It enables the integration of many third-party applications.
A few words about migration
Both WordPress and Drupal have numerous updates. The process of upgrading to the next version is more complicated in Drupal than on WordPress, so you have to be prepared for that.
Ecommerce: with which CMS to “go shopping”?
WordPress was not originally designed as an e-commerce platform. However, there are special plugins to install if you need an ecommerce website, such as WooCommerce, WP-ecommerce and others.
However, Drupal offers more powerful opportunities with its extensions such as Ubercart or Drupal eCommerce, which are recognized as two best extensions for an online shop. Drupal allows easy third-party and external system integration - you can easily connect your online shop to PayPal, Amazon, Google Analytics and others systems in just a few minutes.
If your product range is less than 100 items, WordPress could be your best choice. But if you need a really customized experience including powerful e-commerce tools and a content marketing strategy, it is better to choose Drupal.
Conclusion
So, both Drupal and WordPress could be the best choice for your website, depending on its type, scale and complexity, as well as your requirements for its functionality. However, Drupal can do anything WordPress can, but WordPress doesn’t offer all the opportunities of Drupal. That is why our development team has chosen Drupal. We love challenging and creative tasks. Today, we are one of the largest Drupal development teams working in one office.
As any powerful tool, Drupal works well in the right hands. Want to get a great, unique and smoothly working website? Hire outsourcing developers with over 13 years of expertise and a real passion for creating super functional websites. Enjoy the amazing results!