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Why Drupal Is Better than WordPress

James Guill James GuillWebsite Development Expert
When most of us think about content management system (CMS) software, WordPress is the top product that comes to mind. While WordPress is easily the most popular CMS product among users and reviewers, it’s not necessarily the best. One product that has proven to be popular among larger business and enterprise clients is Drupal.

While Drupal is similar to WordPress in many ways, it also offers many different features. The biggest knock against Drupal is that it isn’t a beginner-friendly product — one of the reasons why it holds only less than a 4% market share among global websites.

However, numerous websites swear by Drupal, including those by many government and educational organizations. Overall, Drupal offers a much more powerful product than WordPress, which is more targeted to the entry-level web design market.

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Drupal Is Better for Large Content Websites

Historically, WordPress has been geared toward the blogging community. As such, some users run into problems when it comes to hosting websites requiring large amounts of data. WordPress tends to handcuff the types and the amount of content each website can manage, but Drupal is much more robust.

For example, Drupal will allow you to use multiple webpage templates on your website, whereas WordPress limits you to a single template. Drupal also supports multiple content types on each webpage, giving developers greater freedom to build their website. And finally, Drupal’s taxonomy system is much more robust, making it easy to handle and classify large chunks of data on your website.

You’re Empowered With Superior Access Control

One knock on WordPress is that user access is too inflexible. You’re handcuffed to five default user roles, and while you can modify some permissions in those roles, you’re still only allowed to change pre-defined permissions.

Drupal offers a true admin system that allows you to customize permissions to users rather than assign them roles. While there are modules you can install to allow for roles, it’s much more secure to assign individual permissions to users. This is similar to what you’d see with Windows permissions or assigning permissions on a server.

For example, if you wanted to, you could give a user the ability to edit blog posts, but not the ability to add webpages to the rest of the website. You have complete control over permissions.

Your Website Will Be Multilingual by Default

If you want to make your website multilingual in WordPress, you’ll have to install plug-ins and then configure those plug-ins. And that’s assuming your plug-in supports the language you’re looking for.

By contrast, Drupal comes with the ability to translate your website to other languages in its core. There’s no need to install extra plug-ins to handle the translation. If you happen to run into the rare language that isn’t part of the core, you can simply search for and install the language rather than install an entirely new plug-in, as you would with WordPress.

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Drupal Gets Hacked a Lot Less, and For Good Reason

It’s not all too uncommon that a WordPress website gets hacked, but can you remember the last time you heard about a major Drupal hack? Odds are that you’ve never heard of one. That’s because Drupal websites get hacked a lot less compared with WordPress. Why is this? Primarily because Drupal security features are more robust than WordPress, and the Drupal community is much more active in spotting and resolving potential security threats.

Drupal’s website announces all significant security threats in modules, and the Drupal Security Team proactively works to furnish solutions. Once solutions are identified, they distribute them through the website.

Also, Drupal includes a security-reporting module you can use to find and resolve any security issues that are found on your website. This allows you to be proactive with security and fix problems before they result in a hack or downtime for your website.

You’re Poised to Take Your Development to Another Level

While it sounds cliche, using Drupal will take your ability to design a website to another level. WordPress is remarkably simple and great for beginners and intermediate web designers, but the problem with the platform is that the technology doesn’t change much. The modules used in WordPress stay mostly the same from release to release.

The latest version of Drupal is built using Symfony2, allowing the application to provide both high performance and expanded functionality. When Drupal is updated, the program is improved to allow for greater functionality. With WordPress, you have to wait for someone to develop a plug-in to expand the functionality of the platform.

Enhanced functionality of the platform allows for greater developmental freedom and is one reason why some of the world’s most important websites are powered by Drupal. If it’s good enough for the White House and U.S. governmental organizations, it will be good enough for your business website.

Looking for a place to host your Drupal website? Check out these six web hosting services.

Upgrade Your Skills and Upgrade Your Website Using Drupal

Now, I’m not saying that WordPress is a horrible product. Many amazing websites run on WordPress. However, numerous organizations choose Drupal over WordPress, and for good reason. Drupal is much more secure and offers a product with greater design options by default than you will find with WordPress.

Of course, some of you are going to point out that WordPress is “easier” to use and offers many more plug-ins than Drupal. That’s true, and you can learn more about this in our WordPress expert review. WordPress is easier to learn and does provide much more in the way of plug-ins. But that ease of use is offset by a program that limits your website’s growth.

Drupal involves a bit of a learning curve, so some of you may choose to hire someone to develop Drupal for you. While this may incur some extra cost regarding time or money, the advantages you gain by using Drupal make up for the costs in the long term. This is especially true if you plan to host a robust e-commerce website or one that requires processing large amounts of data or content.

In the end, the choice boils down to the type of website you need. For personal and small business websites, WordPress is a competent choice that can get the job done. However, if you’re looking for a product that offers robust developmental options, has superior security, and is suitable for enterprise-scale websites, then Drupal is going to be the better option.


Sources

Drupal stats: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-drupal/all/all

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