Today we continue our journey into the world of Content Management Systems (or CMS) with a comparison between two of the biggest open source CMS: WordPress and Drupal.
These are two excellent tools with many similarities: both are open source, available for free and with a large community that works constantly to improve them in order to make them always up-to-date, efficient and as secure as possible.
Created for different needs, the first as a tool for publishing blogs, the second as an instrument for creating communities, today they are two CMS well-known to the general public, although in different manners.
According to research performed by W3TECH, it seems that more than 40% of the websites on the internet were created in WordPress, while Drupal was chosen by a much smaller percentage (i.e., 1.4%).
Major Differences
WordPress has focused on the simplicity of its use and its management capabilities; although not all management and maintenance activities are simple, many of the operations provided by this CMS have been developed in such a way as to be easily manageable even by a person with little technical experience, especially if we talk about websites with basic functionality, such as a blog.
On the other side, Drupal’s approach is different, as it has a more sophisticated structure that requires higher technical skills, both for management and maintenance activities. This higher complexity in carrying out the setting activities in the backend reflects a CMS that, compared to other competitors, has made flexibility one of its strong points.
Drupal is mainly used for corporate and public institutions sites (where it may be necessary to handle a large number of documents).
Although the tools available to the WordPress community are more extensive (with more plugins and templates made available both for free and for a fee) the basic version of Drupal seems to be more adaptable to the needs of a more elaborate site.
All this makes Drupal more versatile and preferable for creating and managing sites with private areas where users can receive personalized communications and documentations.
In particular, it is clear that Drupal, at the cost of higher difficulty in the set-up process, has a greater capacity though in terms of managing the roles of users and visitors, which can be advantageous when dealing with projects that require a high number of profiles to manage (whether these are collaborators or customers).
In these videos it is possible to appreciate the difference between the two CMS in setup requirements for the assignment of user permissions and eventual modifications.
E-commerce
Both CMS versions have plugins which allow you to transform the site into an e-commerce capable of performing the most relevant tasks required to manage an online store (WordPress through WooCommerce, and Drupal through Drupal Commerce).
Both of them offer multiple functions, thanks also to the availability of third-party plugins.
The Drupal solution seems to be more suitable for a large-scale e-commerce, which on WordPress could suffer some performance issues.
The e-commerce extensions for the two CMS’s reflect somewhat the structure of their basic versions, with their relative pros and cons. WordPress offers greater simplicity at the expense of a more limited and less performing system on larger websites, unlike Drupal, which, although requiring more knowledge and effort to manage, offers a more flexible system suitable for an e-commerce with the need to manage a large number of products.
Security
It is undeniable that WordPress is one of the CMSs whose sites have suffered the most attacks from hackers, but this situation is not only due to security problems related to its platform.
One of the reasons for the high number of attacks on sites developed in WordPress is due to the fact that this CMS is the one most used and well-known. Secondly, most of the problems related to WordPress’ security do not relate to its architecture, but are due to plugins that are not periodically updated or are initially installed and used, but later abandoned without being disinstalled.
Outdated plugins not only impact performance negatively, but also constitute a possible security vulnerability.
For all these reasons, we can say that the majority of problems relating to the security of sites built on WordPress are attributable to insufficient maintenance.
Drupal, on the other hand, unlike WordPress, has opted for an internal security program for the management of modules and templates, in order to make its system less susceptible to vulnerabilities, and all applications are analyzed by Drupal. Updating the website and the related components in Drupal, however, is considerably more complicated than the updating and maintenance required by WordPress websites.
SEO
Both WordPress and Drupal do an excellent job of managing SEO. WordPress can count on a number of plugins to perform this task, notably All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO. Drupal, on the other hand, in addition to having built-in user-friendly features (such as the creation of an automated sitemap and good control over the management of URLs and metadata), offers a site with well-structured and clean source code, which helps search engine’s spiders optimize the content on the pages.
Conclusions
In short, we can conclude that WordPress was realized by developers for consumers, while Drupal was designed by developers for developers.
WordPress seems to be more adequate for small and medium-sized companies that need to have a website that is easily manageable and not too complex (e.g. a showcase website or an e-commerce with a restricted number of products); Drupal, on the other hand, is more appropriate for complex and diversified projects, such as the website for a larger company or a public institution.
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Sources:
https://www.drupal.org/community
https://wordpress.org/support/
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress
https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/cm-drupal,cm-wordpress
