What Is Drupal? Drupal vs. WordPress Compared

Choosing the right CMS for a website is a very important step. If you want to build a website from scratch you can use a CMS to help you design and website management. But which CMS is best for you? Drupal and WordPress are currently two leading choices in the CMS world, each with its own strengths. So which is better, Drupal or WordPress? Let's take a look at these two CMSs in the article below from MONA Media to find the answer.

What is Drupal?

Created in 2000 by Belgian developer Dries Buytaert, Drupal is a free open-source PHP content management system for building personal blogs or e-commerce sites. Drupal 8 is currently the most widely used open-source platform. It is used to build online user experiences, especially in professional web designers.

After a long development, Drupal has become one of the content management solutions suited to organizations looking for a powerful CMS for their business website. It is also constantly improved to integrate new features.

See more:

• The most popular CMSs today
• Should you hand-code a website or use a CMS?

What is WordPress?

WordPress is open source, uses the MySQL database management system and is written in PHP. It is a tool that helps built an e-commerce website, you get a website simply by installing it on a host. Then you install a theme to change the look. And if you want a livelier, better-optimized site, you can change the theme and install more plugins.

Pros and cons of each

Advantages of Drupal

• Support for large teams: Drupal has a sophisticated permissions system that makes user management simpler and more effective. It manages users better than WordPress, so it suits large project teams better.
• Multilingual support: Multilingual support is built into the core. If you want to build a site in several languages, Drupal is the best choice.
• Well-organized content: If your website has a lot of content, you can take advantage of Drupal's taxonomy system. It is very flexible and easy to configure for each content type and your own needs.
• Strong content customization: Drupal lets you create many kinds of content and different sites. It offers features similar to WordPress plugins, but they are coded directly into Drupal's core.

Advantages of WordPress

• Flexibility: With a huge system of plugins and themes, you can easily build the website you want.
• Easy to use: If you really dig in, you will spend a lot of time getting deep into WordPress, because you will be surprised by what it offers. But basically WordPress is easier to use than Drupal, especially for webmasters without much technical knowledge and for beginners.
• Large user community: Whatever problem you run into, you can easily find a solution with a Google search. You can also find many in-depth WordPress tutorial sites to build your skills quickly.
• Low cost: Besides the cost of renting domains and Web Hosting, you can use free plugins and themes to build a site that fits you.

What Drupal and WordPress have in common

Both being CMSs, Drupal and WordPress share some similarities. Both are written in PHP and both are free and open source. Both also have themes and templates to change how a site looks, and users can add new features to both WordPress and Drupal.

Drupal vs WordPress: which is better

Which platform is easier to use

Drupal

If you use a beginner-friendly hosting plan, you can install Drupal easily. On a more advanced hosting environment you have more options and can install many different CMSs directly, Drupal included.

Drupal also comes in several versions called distributions. If you know exactly what type of website you need to build, you can pick one of them instead of installing the plain core with no customization.

WordPress

One reason WordPress has more users than any other CMS in the world is that it is very easy to use and set up. You can install WordPress on hosting in a few minutes. Most hosting environments offer one-click installation, so you will not run into any difficulty.

Managing the website

Drupal

If you are not a developer, updating Drupal is fairly difficult because it does not offer an interface for updating itself. On the other hand, this CMS is very good for SEO and has tools that help you improve your site's SEO.

You can also add features by installing SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO. The Drupal community is also large, so you can get plenty of help.

WordPress

Updating WordPress is simple, from themes to WordPress core and plugins. Everything can be done with a few clicks from the WordPress dashboard. If you use WordPress, update it regularly to avoid unexpected errors.

Which CMS is faster?

Drupal

Drupal can make a website extremely fast. The reason is that this CMS is very lightweight, which makes communication with the server and response times quicker.

This also lets you run websites with thousands of pages smoothly, and you can add extensions to give the site more features and make it even faster.

WordPress

One of WordPress's biggest problems is speed. It is possible to make it faster, but many webmasters do not optimize it properly. If you optimize correctly, you can build faster websites.

WordPress can also deliver fast speeds. However, if you use many themes or poorly coded plugins, the site will lag and loading speed will suffer a lot.

To fix this, use a caching plugin, image optimization, choose quality hosting optimized for WordPress, and use a good theme. These are the basics you should apply to make your website run faster.

See more: How to speed up a WordPress website

Which CMS is more flexible?

Drupal

You can customize Drupal with modules and extensions, much like plugins and themes in WordPress, so you can go very deep into a Drupal site. However, this customization is quite hard if you cannot code. You need to find, install and configure everything manually, with no point-and-click interface like WordPress.

WordPress

WordPress has a huge number of plugins and themes. You can change your site's look easily with themes, and add extra features with plugins.

Besides free themes and plugins, you can buy premium versions and good plugins at low prices. Paid plugins have more features and better support. Prices vary depending on the quality and flexibility of the plugin or theme.

Which platform is more secure?

Drupal

For years, Drupal has had a reputation as one of the most secure content management systems. It has been used to build websites for the White House and other government sites, which says a lot about its high security standard. Drupal has had security problems in the past, mostly MySQL injections, but these holes were fixed quickly.

One thing is certain: Drupal takes security very seriously and sets an extremely high security standard. Drupal no longer has many plugins and themes, so it also attracts less attention from hackers.

WordPress

WordPress's core code is very secure. However, as more and more themes and plugins are created, they expose more security holes. Because WordPress is such a well-known CMS, it is also an easier target for hackers. In fact, WordPress has been the most-hacked CMS to date.

Still, these security weaknesses are easy to fix. Hackers usually focus only on outdated WordPress versions or faulty themes and plugins.

Choosing the right CMS is an extremely important step in building and growing your website. If you pick the wrong one, you will run into a lot of trouble while using it. The right CMS depends on your needs and your own skills. We hope the information above helps you understand more about Drupal vs WordPress and lets you make the right choice.