People that are interested in building their own websites with free content management systems will likely want to compare WordPress vs Drupal, which are two of the most powerful systems available. Even though both WordPress and Drupal can be customized to achieve the same result on a site, there are a number of reasons why someone would want to pick one over the other.
WordPress and Drupal Ease of Use
A content management system, or CMS, is typically used because it is designed to simplify the process of creating and maintaining a website. Although this is the basic purpose of a CMS, when someone compares WordPress vs Drupal, there is an obvious difference.
WordPress, or WP, was designed for bloggers, while Drupal is more commonly used for typical types of business websites. For this reason, WordPress can really offer more simplicity that is very appealing for beginners. It can also be used to create sites other than blogs, but beginners may have a difficult time trying to customize the system to make it work for a customized situation.
Drupal is a lot easier to use to create sites like e-commerce websites, although this is primarily because of the availability of free e-commerce shopping cart plugins with this system. They can also be found for WP, but the free versions are not very great and commercial versions can be expensive. Overall, the WordPress system has always been easier to use versus Drupal, although they have tried to make newer versions more user friendly.
Many developers also find that Drupal is more difficult for building customized modules, although the main difference between the two in this aspect is the use of a tag based template system with Drupal. Many programmers find this template system to be more cumbersome than beneficial.
Customization of WordPress vs. Drupal
Overall, there is a very wide range of site designs and additional features that can be easily added to both content management systems. However, choosing one system over the other can actually limit a site builder on how the site can look or work. For this reason, it is important to figure out what a site is going to do and how it should look before software for one of these systems is installed.
Even though Drupal can be configured to work like a blog, WordPress is the obvious choice for that type of site, but determining the best system for other types of sites may not be as straightforward. Many people often decide to take a look at WP first for other types of sites because there are simply more theme and plugin developers than there are for Drupal.
Another important thing worth mentioning is that a plugin on Drupal is actually called a module. There are free modules available, like UberCart, that are perfect for building a wide variety of e-commerce websites, while WordPress users will have a hard time finding something this good.
One more thing to consider when picking a system is when major versions of them were last released. This is important because big system changes will often mean that old themes and plugins will no longer work. For this reason, the same things may not get updated for the new version release, which can cause a major lack of bug-free software for CMS users to choose from.
As an example, Drupal suffered this problem with the release of version 7, which went unused for a while because there simply weren’t enough good modules to use with it. Many of the modules that were designed for version 6 and updated to version 7 were also full of problems at first, so people who had upgraded to version 7 found out that they had to downgrade their software to get it working.
CMS Speed and SEO
Drupal was designed to be a more robust and powerful system, even though it requires programming or web design knowledge to be able to take full advantage of it. WordPress was designed to be a lightweight blogging platform. As a result, WP is faster than Drupal with the basic systems are compared, although the speed of either one can be altered depending on the theme being used and the plugins or modules that are enabled.
The speed of a content management system is important for a few reasons. First of all, a faster system is easier to work with simply because pages load more quickly. For this same reason, people visiting the websites will have a similar experience with the amount of time it takes for the pages to load. If a site takes too long to load, a lot of people will simply close the page or try another site if they were browsing through search engine results, so it is important to ensure that a site runs as efficiently as possible.
In addition to creating a better experience for both the site creator and visitors, search engines track the loading time of a page and can use it as a factor in search engine rankings. Site owners who are trying to perform search engine optimization, or SEO, campaigns cannot ignore how long it takes for their sites to load because slow sites can always have better rankings if they loaded faster.
Overall, when comparing the SEO effectiveness of WordPress vs. Drupal, WordPress typically gets better results with both loading speed and on-site content optimization. It is easier to get the important areas of a site optimized when WP is used. Even the basic installation offers search engine friendly URLs, while this is more complicated to do with Drupal.
There are also a number of very powerful SEO plugins available for WP that will address many of the major factors that search engines look at for ranking sites. Some of these plugins are free and still provide all the SEO essentials that is site is going to need. Commercial plugins will typically offer automated content scanning to actually make specific recommendations to improve search engine rankings.
