It’s no secret that WordPress is the leader of the CMS pack. So much that Google often expresses their love for this powerful CMS. However, there are still many who feel it doesn’t hold up to it’s other counterparts, such as Drupal. While WordPress and Drupal have a lot in common, the two platforms are still very different in their own ways. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages depending on the purpose and people maintaining your website. Let’s take a look…
Usability
As new technology arises, marketers must adapt and learn how to use them properly. This learning curve is one element many companies don’t consider when choosing a CMS. With marketers taking the lead on most website initiatives, it’s important to provide them with a system that is easy to use and maintain. This is one major drawback to the Drupal platform. The back end of Drupal is fairly complicated for less tech-savvy marketers and requires users who are proficient in HTML, PHP, and other programming languages. That said, this makes it more difficult and time-consuming to teach the platform to both users and clients.
However, compared to WordPress, user friendliness is one of their strongest suits.
Customizability
Similar to WordPress, Drupal does provide for the ability to make one-of-a-kind websites. In fact, the entire concept of Drupal is aimed at the development of custom websites. The drawback to this function pertains to the quantity of available modules and the fact that you cannot install these modules from inside your dashboard as you would be able to with WordPress. Also, while there are many free options, Drupal does require a fee for the more popular and widely-used options.
With WordPress, you can do more than just install themes and plugins right from your dashboard, but you can also search through the 40,000 free plugins right from the WordPress website.
Support
The Drupal platform offers similar support in regards to documentation, support forums, and user groups that are run by the Drupal community. However, because of the advanced technical skills needed to make changes on this platform, the community of developers is much smaller than that of WordPress. This makes finding professional help that much harder – and frustrating – when dealing with an urgent website issue). The complexity of Drupal makes it more likely that you will have to hire professional help which tends to be more expensive.
Compared to the WordPress community of developers around the world, you can rest assured that there is always eyes and ears on the status of WordPress and there is someone ready to fix any problem immediately, and most often for free.
Another important note to remember is that as your business grows, so will your website. This may require you to expand the flexibility and functionality of your site as traffic increases and more content publishes. If you’re site is on Drupal and you on the hunt for a new vendor, chances are you’ll have to stick with a Drupal vendor or developer — who don’t forget can get costly because of their technical knowledge. Especially important for enterprise-grade websites, with WordPress, you’ll never be stuck with one vendor or CMS platform, thanks to the large community of developers wanting and willing to improve your site.
Digital & Social Articles on Business 2 Community(77)
