Drupal vs WordPress: Choosing the Right Platform for Your Website

1. Installation

WordPress is one of the simplest CMS to install. This simplicity is one of its unique selling points and has attracted millions of entrepreneurs to create their websites. Once you’ve installed WordPress, you get an intuitive dashboard.

Drupal, however, is a slightly complicated CMS that can become nothing short of a headache without some technical know-how. Despite its complexity, Drupal offers extensive customizability (more on this in the next section).

2. Customization

As of 2024, WordPress offers 55000+ plugins in its directory. For example, WooCommerce powers over 6.3 million e-commerce websites worldwide.

Drupal has over 4000 modules for customizing your website. If you install Drupal with CMS hosting, you can access different customization options. You will have to use extensions and modules for it, though. Several university and government websites use Drupal as their CMS. 71% of the top 100 universities in the US run on Drupal.

3. Ease Of Use

WordPress is beginner-friendly. You can go from nothing to a fully functional website in less than 24 hours, and the learning curve is easy. The Appearance tab offers different theme customizations for your website. Moreover, you can also install drag-and-drop builders to make site building easier.

Compared to WordPress, Drupal is a little challenging to learn and can become especially difficult if you have no experience in website building. It has a steeper learning curve because you need to know HTML, PHP, and other programming languages for extensive customization. You will also have to make code adjustments where needed.

4. Security

Security is undoubtedly the biggest concern for entrepreneurs. You probably want to ensure the highest level of security for your users.

While WordPress’s core is highly secure, security holes are created when third-party plugins and themes are used. Moreover, its popularity also puts it at risk. Despite these risks, you can keep your website secure if you follow WordPress security practices. Moreover, avoid installing a theme or plugin that is coded poorly.

Drupal, on the other hand, is a highly secure CMS. Various high-security government websites use it. Drupal’s USP is its security. Its small theme and plugin marketplace also ensures that Drupal-powered websites are less susceptible to hacking.

5. SEO

Your website’s work does not finish after it’s built and the content has been uploaded. Rather, it continues as long as the site is live and accessible for your visitors. SEO optimization is essential to ensuring your users and consumers keep coming back to your website.

In the comparison of Drupal vs WordPress, WordPress is better with SEO. It has an auto-generated XML sitemap that improves your website’s visibility on search engines. However, only business users can use Google Analytics and advanced SEO tools to install third-party plugins. You can install plugins like Yoast SEO to optimize your website further.

Drupal is a bit trickier when it comes to SEO, but once you get the hang of it, it is a lot easier to navigate. It comes with built-in SEO practices and extensions like Yoast SEO to improve functionality. It offers improved metatags, structured data, and canonical URLs. Drupal has modules or codes that add new features or alter the website’s operationality.

6. Performance

A fast-loading site is essential for customer satisfaction and ensures that you rank higher in SERP results.

Drupal helps produce efficient, effective, and fast-loading websites. It isn’t very resource-intensive, so it allows for faster response time and fast server communication. Drupal is well-equipped to handle websites with thousands of pages. You can also add more extensions to improve performance.

In contrast, speed is WordPress’s downside. You can make it fast, but you will have to use WordPress-managed hosting and run it on an optimized server environment for your site.

7. Support

WordPress provides localized email support, contact forms, community forums, and live chat assistance around the clock on weekdays.

Drupal provides community support via Stack Exchange, Core Issue Queue, forums, and community documentation.

8. Flexibility

Both WordPress and Drupal are open-source platforms. Hence, you can build the website of your dreams on both of these platforms. Moreover, you can easily add features without any previous coding knowledge. WordPress and Drupal can also be turned into headless CMS if need be.

Now let’s look at Drupal vs WordPress in the context of flexibility. WordPress has a huge collection of plugins and themes. Your website’s core will be built using a theme, while any and all additional features will be added through plugins. It offers a massive free plugin and theme library, as well as premium versions of most themes and plugins. The premium versions are higher in quality and have an additional feature set. You can build practically all types of websites with WordPress.

As stated before, most Drupal customizations are handled via extensions and modules. You can heavily customize your website, but these customizations can be a little tricky if you don’t know how to code.  Most of these extensions have to be located, installed, and set up. Drupal is not as intuitive as WordPress.

9. E-Commerce

WordPress offers a comprehensive suite of e-commerce tools for any and all kinds of business. To increase the functionality of your website, you can create an online store, add products, and install e-commerce plugins on WordPress without any hassle. Collecting payments is also easy because you can set up subscriptions with one-click, automated, and credit or debit card payments.

With Drupal Commerce, users can create e-commerce sites tailored to their business needs. Drupal’s key features include dynamic product ranges, different order types, promotions, a strong payment API, and order administration.