Choosing a CMS for your website is a tough choice. And even more so, if you’re not quite sure about what you absolutely require, what you can do without and what to definitely stay away from. This post is aimed at presenting you with the comparison of the two prominent CMSs – Drupal and WordPress. In no way is it going to persuade you in favour of either one, but would present the overview of the features.
General overview
WordPress has long been known as a publishing or blogging platform. At present, many users still believe it to be used just for blogging. That’s not true. Since 2003, WordPress has grown into a real CMS – content management system, and it possesses more than enough features to be called one.
Drupal is 2 years older than WordPress, and it is often called “the developer platform”. It is a powerful framework used not only for building websites, but also for applications development. It’s got extensive opportunities for creating sites of any complexity, provided you’ve got expertise in this area.
Usability
WordPress claims to be the most easy-to-use CMS in the market, and it’s really simple to get started in a very short time – even for a user with no experience. However, this would mean the basic site. To configure your website and make it correspond to your requirements, you’ve got to work on it.
Still, thanks to the intuitive interface and the visual editor (WYSIWYG -what you see is what you get), publishing content is the matter of a few mouse clicks.
As to Drupal, this CMS calls for more efforts to be used successfully. For a beginner, mastering the basic functions would require more learning than WordPress. For example. the visual editor is not included in the out-of-the box install, but it can be implemented by adding a plugin. For a non-technical user managing content may seem complicated, but a seasoned developer will possibly find this CMS straightforward and very functional.
SEO
Now, SEO matters for everyone who’s got the smallest bit of ambition and desires to let the world see their Internet project -the website.
In terms of SEO, both Drupal and WP are working great with the help of additional plugins for meta tags, SEO-friendly URLs, sitemaps etc. The difference here lies in the fact that with WordPress you may get lost because of the abundance of plugins available, while in Drupal its vice versa, but this can be hardly called an issue.
Customisation Opportunities
Both CMSs can be modified and fit to suit your specific needs by using multiple addons and plugins to implement the most various functions for your website. Thanks to very active communities, there are many plugins available for free.
The issues may occur concerning the management of these modules. In WordPress, to ensure the proper work of your site, generally you don’t need too many plugins, so you can handle their updates with no problems.
With Drupal, however, the number of modules for an average site to work is much bigger. You’d need to keep track of their compatibility and upgrades, which is not an easy task.
Design
Both CMSs have a big number of free themes available. WordPress is believed to have greater variety of those.
It may be due to the fact that Drupal is often chosen as a platform for big corporations, which require the unique Brand theme. On the contrary, apart from corporate sites, WordPress is also a frequent choice of non-technical users, for simple small websites or personal blogs due to its simplicity. This creates the demand for the ready-made themes.
Conclusion
Very often, comparison of Drupal and WordPress CMS is called “battle”. In fact, it’s the matter of preference and depends on many factors. Both are powerful and rich solutions, and you can’t name objective reasons why one is better than the other.
To make up your mind, you can try out both CMSs (they are both free). In case you’ve already made your choice but would like to check out the other opportunity, you can do it with aisite online service. It provides automated Drupal to WordPress migration or vice versa.
