Which CMS is better for my business: WordPress or Drupal | Pros & Cons Of Each CMS

Which CMS is better for my business: WordPress or Drupal | Pros & Cons Of Each CMS

Which CMS Is Best, WordPress or Drupal?

Your CMS or content management system needs to empower you as an online business. Content reigns supreme online, and if you’re hoping to increase traffic to your website, improve conversion rates or position yourself as an industry expert, content marketing will be a major part of your digital marketing plan. Whether you have experience in content marketing already, or you’re learning as you go, one important decision to make is which CMS is right for you.

Each CMS platform will have a set of unique features, making it slightly different from the rest, so you’ll need to have your content marketing goals ironed out, and know exactly what you need from a CMS before making a final decision. In this article, we’re going to look at two of the most popular content management systems on the market, WordPress and Drupal, and highlight the pros, cons of each CMS, and help you figure out which is best for your business.

WordPress CMS 

First launched in 2003, WordPress has developed and grown over the years to now offer the world’s most popular content management system. It’s estimated that a staggering 455 million websites currency use WordPress around the world. With over 55,000 plugins and a seemingly limitless amount of WordPress themes to choose from, building a website on WordPress is a pretty simple and straightforward process. When it comes to creating and uploading content, WordPress has it’s own easy to use CMS, which allows business owners to refresh their website with SEO content.

WordPress Pros

WordPress gives business owners the freedom to build many different types of websites, from e-commerce platforms, simple one-page websites and more complex membership and service-based sites.

WordPress is customizable and you can install thousands of WordPress compatible plugins which allows you to add photo galleries, show social media feeds, newsletter signups and add SEO plugins to your website, to help you create keyword-rich content.

Should you struggle when it comes to adding new products and editing product descriptions or category content on your website, there is a huge WordPress community that you can reach out to for help, guidance or support.

One of the best things about WordPress CMS is that you don’t need to know any code to develop your website, edit and update content, and customize your site.

 WordPress Cons

You do need to pay to host your website on WordPress and you’ll also need to purchase a domain name. You also have the responsibility to protect your website, and make sure your site is backed up.

When adding new content to your website, should you lose internet connection for a split second and you haven’t hit save, you risk losing your hard work.

There is no drag and drop built-in feature, allowing you to move text boxes around freely, or drop images exactly where you want them to appear.

With so many plugins and WordPress templates available, it can feel a bit daunting when first building a website.

Drupal CMS

Drupal

Drupal is another popular CMS that prides itself on offering a content-first, commerce-first and community-first marketing solution for business owners. According to Drupal’s website, 70% of universities use Drupal to create their websites and this may be due to its focus on security. Like WordPress, Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP, and was first launched in 2000. As the third most popular CMS, Drupal is used by over 1 million websites and was previously used by The White House.

Drupal Pros

For international businesses, Drupal CMS is available in 100 languages, making it a fantastic CMS if you have a multi-lingual team, or you want to provide content in a range of languages online. Drupal’s automated language translation allows businesses to reach customers around the globe with localized content and seamless translation.

Drupal CMS also has a 97% customer satisfaction rate, which reflects its performance, security and number of available themes and modules which are free to use.

Content creators can use Drupal’s CaaS, or content-as-a-service, to create one piece of content and publish it across multi-channels, eliminating the need to copy and past and helping to streamline content marketing.

Drupal has a free to join online community, which can provide you with help and assistance in the form of forums, chat rooms and other resources.

Drupal Cons

Drupal is an advanced and in some cases complex CMS, that does require the support of developers. If you have experience in developing or someone in your team can help you with this, then you’re good to go, but Drupal is not ideal for someone with limited or no development skills.

Drupal can be difficult to install and may also require some technical help.

Themes and plugins are not always free to use and since many Drupal websites are custom-coded, you may need to pay a developer when building or customizing your website.