Drupal vs WordPress: Explaining The 5 Key Differences

Building and managing a website has never been so easy. Thanks to the content management system (CMS) software that anyone can easily build and manage a website today. Doing so is no more a hard nut to crack. It takes no time to create a fully-functional website with a CMS and the users needn’t write any code. However, the availability of different types of CMS these days also raises a question about which one to choose for website development services. You can use a CMS to create a whole range of websites like blogs, business portals, e-commerce websites, social media platforms, and more.

Drupal and WordPress are the leading CMS available today. The combined users for both of these platforms account for more than half of the total CMS users worldwide. There are several similarities between Drupal and WordPress like they’re both open-source, offer modules/plugins for extending functionality, there is huge community support for both, and so on. However, several dissimilarities also exist between Drupal vs WordPress that makes one of them the best choice than the other. We’ll look at some of the differences between Drupal vs WordPress that set them apart.

1. Drupal vs WordPress: Which one is easier?

Drupal is considered to be a more complex CMS due to its intimidating interface. In comparison to WordPress, it’s relatively hard to deal with. However, installing Drupal on a host is easy as hosting services offer various options to install different CMS including Drupal. You may need to hire Drupal developer to create a custom theme because working with Drupal might be daunting. WordPress makes it easy to develop a fully-functional website even from scratch with minimal efforts.

Result: WordPress wins.

2. Drupal vs WordPress: Which is more secure?

Drupal is a very secure platform and a lower user base than WordPress also makes it less prone to cyber threats as compared to WP. It is arguably considered as a more secure platform than WordPress. However, like anything which is not 100% secure, there might be some vulnerabilities with a Drupal website that can be exploited. On the other hand, WordPress being the most popular CMS is the prime target for most hacking and malware attacks. WP core is very secure and most of the vulnerabilities arise from the users’ side.

Result: Drupal wins.

3. Drupal vs WordPress: Which is easier to customize?

Ease of customizability depends on the availability of resources for enhancing the existing functionality of your site. By using modules and themes, you can customize a Drupal website but finding a proper theme or module is not easy. Due to the complexity of the Drupal platform, doing customization is a daunting task for a beginner. Also, there are lesser themes and modules available for customization for Drupal users as compared to WordPress. There is a good number of plugins and website themes available for WP users that can be used to customize the site. With the help of a WordPress developer, you can easily create a highly customized WordPress website.

Result: WordPress wins.

4. Drupal vs WordPress: Which one is faster?

For a delightful user experience as well as a good ranking on a search engine, the faster loading speed of a site is an absolute necessity. It doesn’t matter how beautiful and attractive your site is if it’s taking ages to load the visitors will leave the site and move on to others. Website speed is an essential consideration when choosing a CMS. Drupal is lightweight in comparison to WordPress because it’s not resource-intensive. So, Drupal development services are ideal for creating a heavy website with hundreds or thousands of pages. When it comes to speed, WordPress is somewhat disappointing. Although WordPress websites can also be very fast most of the time users fail to optimize their websites in the correct way that makes the website speed relatively slower.

Result: Drupal wins.

5. Drupal vs WordPress: Which has greater community support?

Although it has been mentioned earlier, still WordPress has the largest community supporting the platform. There is a huge community of developers, experts, webmasters, learners, etc who are either providing or seeking some solutions. Do you find any trouble with your WordPress website? You can easily find a solution for that which someone would have already provided. However, it’s not the case with Drupal as the community support is short as compared to WP. But it’s evolving and more solutions are being created.

Result: WordPress wins.

Wrapping up

Content management systems have emerged as a real lifesaver as they offer a simple way to create and manage websites. Another benefit of using a CMS is creating custom websites by converting Photoshop files to WordPress, Drupal, or other CMS. There are lots of CMS out there to choose from today like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, PrestaShop, etc. Drupal and WordPress are the leading content management systems and they have vast user bases around the world. There are many factors that are found common in both of these platforms, yet there are many subtle differences that set them apart. We hope that the differences we discussed above between these platforms will help you in creating a robust custom website development solution.

Author Bio

Emily White is a senior web developer at CSSChopper – a reliable technology partner for those who are looking for world-class front-end and custom web development services. Emily loves coding and she is also fond of writing. She composes informative and quality blogs and articles for her audience during the time when she is free from coding. She wants to make her audience enlightened and aware of the latest technologies and trends through her content.