Drupal and WordPress are two of the leading content management systems (CMS) out there today, but which is the best for what you need? Both have their advantages, but which benefit your business more? With those questions in mind, let’s take a look at each CMS and see what they are offering.
Usability
WordPress has a very quick learning curve, which is great if you’re building your website yourself, or your developer is handing the back-end over to you later on. It also offers an extensive plugin library to help you improve your website, and a huge range of themes, which together enables you to customize your website easily and ensure its high quality.
SEO
Both CMS’s offer strong SEO capabilities, with each designed to build websites that will land you in the top pages of search engine results, ensuring you a good flow of users coming through regularly. This is, of course, improved by continuously creating new content for your website, giving search engines a constant supply of new SEO to feed from.
Suitability
Enterprises may find that Drupal is more suitable for them, and for their website’s security, given that it offers the better version controls and access control list capabilities, whereas small to medium-sized businesses may find WordPress suitable, as they aren’t posting quite as much content, from which WordPress won’t be slowed down.
Multiple authors
If you require a website that can be edited and added to by more than one person, WordPress is the best option, enabling multiple users to access the back-end of your website. This can also be particularly useful for giving access to guest bloggers.
Design
Drupal offers a lot more design options for a more complex website if that is what you need. However, if you’re after something quite simple, with less features, WordPress could work for you. Similarly, by hiring a designer skilled and experienced with WordPress, you are open to a lot more design options.
Scope for developers
Drupal is great for web developers to work with for how many options it offers. However, if you are hoping to take over from your developer on completion of building your website, or if you are looking to build it from scratch yourself, Drupal isn’t as user-friendly as WordPress.
Affordability
WordPress is certainly more affordable than Drupal. With WordPress you are given what you need to build a basic website without having to buy any of their plugins, though you may find some useful to you. Whereas with Drupal, you need their plugins (or ‘modules’) to justify using it, which can get costly. Drupal’s basic installation doesn’t include any themes either.
Conclusion
Depending on the type and size of your business, both CMS’s having their winning factors, and for the most part it comes to down to the fact that Drupal is considered to be more complex to use, with a steeper learning curve, but for the more experienced it can offer more options and features. A WordPress website however is something you can easily manage and maintain yourself.
If you think WordPress is for you, we offer advanced WordPress design, and would be more than happy to discuss ideas – please don’t hesitate to get in touch via the contact form below.