WordPress vs Drupal, which is the best CMS?
Yngve W. Bergheim
CEO
Sven Berg Ryen
Senior Drupal developer
Sohail Lajevardi
Drupal Frontend Engineer
Stephan Zeidler
Chief Technical Architect 09.04.2024Content Management Systems (CMS) have revolutionized the way we build and manage websites. Drupal and WordPress are two of the most popular CMS platforms worldwide.
In Ramsalt we have many employees with experience from both CMSes and in this article we have gathered some reasons why Drupal could be a better choice for your needs:
Performance
- Drupal is a lightweight CMS that allows you to create fast-loading websites with minimal resources. You can also add website-caching plugins to improve performance.
- WordPress is a lot slower than Drupal. WordPress websites are often slower to load than Drupal sites, making speed a major shortcoming.(link is external)
Flexibility and Complexity
- WordPress is like Duplo, Drupal is like Lego. Drupal is known for its flexibility in building more complex websites. It’s ideal for users with technical skills or access to a developer.
- With the Gutenberg Editor, the editorial interface with WordPress and Drupal gets merged. so you can get the WordPress feeling combined with the strengths of Drupal.
- Drupal is often chosen for sites that require complex data organization and for projects that require precise permissions and workflows.
Security
- Drupal is considered to be the most secure CMS. Drupal has robust security measures, making it a popular choice for government institutions and other large, security-conscious entities.
- Drupal sites tend to get hacked less often than WordPress sites, which speaks volumes about its robust security measures.
- WordPress accounted for 96 percent of all hacked CMS sites in 2022.
Multilingual Support
- Drupal supports multilingual websites by default, which can be a crucial feature for global businesses.
Developer Experience
- WordPress has a “hacky” architecture and the developer experience is worse than Drupal.
- Drupal has a clean open source mentality, everything on drupal.org is free to use. WordPress has a more commercial model where modules and themes etc you might have to pay for.
- Drupal has very good migration tools, so it makes it easy to migrate from existing CMS to Drupal.
- Drupal has a granular role and permission handling whereas in WordPress you have to go through hoops to get anything besides a few predefined roles.
Other
- WordPress was originally made for the blogging community and is struggling to solve bigger challenges.
- WordPress plugins are “monsters” containing “everything and the kitchen sink” and are not always designed to be expandable through hooks.
- There’s mainly professional development agencies offering Drupal. While there are a lot of companies offering WordPress services they tend to be freelancers and advertising agencies without professional developers, which make the websites often suffer with bad architecture choices and buggy code, leaving them vulnerable for hackers.
- Some of the “free” themes and modules constantly nag you to buy into the premium version and there’s no way to turn off the noisy notifications.
- Plugins in WordPress often don’t work well with each other, if you enable one plugin, it might cause conflict with another.
- Layout builder - make it possible for an editor to make landing pages fast and easy.
- Drupal is packed with tools for multichannel publishing, digital asset management, and SEO.
While WordPress is a great platform for beginners and bloggers, Drupal’s flexibility, robust security, superior user access control, multilingual support, scalability, and development opportunities make it a powerful solution for most websites.
Remember, the choice between Drupal and WordPress depends on your specific needs for website you intend to build. Both have their strengths and cater to different types of projects.
Contact us for a free talk about your requirements so we can find the best solution for you.