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WordPress vs Drupal – A Clear Choice for the Majority of Websites

WordPress vs Drupal Comparison ChartThe debate between WordPress and Drupal isn’t much of one when it comes to the majority of bloggers and webmasters. Most will choose WordPress because it’s so easy to use and so popular. There are still many webmasters and blogger that have never even heard of Drupal. However, Drupal still has its place in the market, although very small.

Out of the top one million websites using a content management system of some sort, over 14% use WordPress and only 1.3% use Drupal. This makes a big difference for WordPress users, which is vital to the success of a new website or blog. The difference comes in the way of the community built around WordPress compared to Drupal. If you can’t figure out how to use something in WordPress, you can find plenty of free tutorials to help you figure it out. This isn’t the case with Drupal because the community is so much smaller.

Those with experience in the world of content management systems know the massive benefits of WordPress compared to Drupal. When looking at Drupal vs. WordPress, it’s easy for experienced web developers to see why WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. However, for those without much experience, it’s important to show the proof and help you choose the right CMS for your website/blog.

Why is WordPress the Better CMS Choice?

WordPress
Once you start building your first website/blog with WordPress, you’ll see why so many people choose it for their CMS. It’s by far the easiest of the popular content management systems to use and perfect for anybody looking to run a blog or a blog/website combination. Adding posts, pages, images and other types of content is very easy and the technology behind it is very simple.

Since WordPress is a browser-based program, you can login from any computer and manage your site from anywhere. This makes it very easy for a blogger that travels or a business person on the go. You won’t need to understand how to write HTML or use FTP because it’s not necessary. WordPress provides you with all the tools you need and the search engines absolutely love WordPress websites.

Compared to Drupal, WordPress is easier to learn and most will learn how to use the system much faster. Drupal is more technical and doesn’t give you all the easy-to-use tools. You get a blog built into your website with WordPress, which makes it very easy to start adding content immediately.

Along with all the benefits that come along with WordPress, your site will be 100% customizable with the thousands of free and paid themes, plugins and other tools. Users can even create profiles with limited access for authors, contributors and others providing work on the site.

Why Would Someone Choose Drupal?

DrupalThere are many reasons to choose Drupal over any other CMS option. The system itself provides a clean look with many high quality modules making it easy to build a website and manage your content. It’s built for high performance with built-in caching, scalable databases and InnoDB default. You can even integrate many third party applications with SOAP, REST and JSON.

Drupal is an incredibly powerful framework that can serve as a solid foundation for virtually any type of website you can think of, however customization of that nature is best suited to more advanced users and developers. On the other hand, while WordPress is easy to customize using a variety of plugins, further customization can also be challenging, and at times the “easy to use interface” can get in the way of major customizations.

The main reason for choosing Drupal over WordPress is the security, SEO benefits and management ability.

Even though it’s clear that WordPress has a much larger community around it than Drupal, there are still thousands of developers and over 8,000 modules to choose from. It’s not a small community, it’s just small in comparison.

Some of the top sites using WordPress include:

  • Ebay
  • Yahoo
  • Digg
  • Wall Street Journal
  • Ford
  • People Magazine
  • Sony
  • Playstation
  • Samsung
  • New York Times
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • And Many More!

Some of the big sites using Drupal include:

  • Amherst College
  • Digett
  • Popular Science
  • Warner Brothers Records
  • Symantec Connect
  • Examiner
  • The Economist
  • The White House
  • And Many More!

WordPress vs Drupal

The Feature Battle – WordPress vs. Drupal

WordPress makes it super easy to use the thousands of great features. You can control everything from your dashboard and it’s very similar to many other free blogging systems. Many features for SEO and blogging are already built into the system and you can customize just about every part of the system, if you want.
Drupal gives you plenty of features, but you have to create custom features yourself. If you look at the feature page from drupal.org and you find it very confusing, you’re not alone. It’s not exactly beginner friendly, but for those that understand how to use the features, it’s very powerful.

Plug-ins and Themes

When looking at Drupal vs. WordPress and zooming in on the plug-ins, it’s pretty easy to see which CMS offers more. WordPress offers nearly 15,000 plug-ins, whereas Drupal provides just over 8,000, which they call modules. Does this number really matter? Yes, it does because with more options, you can gain many added benefits.

The number of themes provides by both is about the same ratio. WordPress provides nearly 1,400 themes, which doesn’t include the custom themes you can have designed for you, whereas Drupal give you 885 choices. Many of the WordPress themes provide options making each theme customizable into many different theme choices.

Is WordPress Easier to Use than Drupal?

Drupal isn’t hard to use, but it’s harder to learn how to use it than WordPress. With the massive community of WordPress users, you can easily find the answer to your questions, whereas Drupal doesn’t have the same large user base or resources. Drupal is for the experienced user, whereas WordPress allows both beginners and advanced users plenty of easy-to-use options.

WordPress Admin Panel

WordPress Admin Panel

Drupal Admin Panel

Drupal Admin Panel

Customization – WordPress vs. Drupal

WordPress vs Drupal Market ShareCustomizing your blog or website is very important. Most of the customization is done through the theme and plug-ins or modules. With WordPress, you gain a ton of options for customizing your site. This gives you more control and some of the premium themes let you change every single part of the site, if necessary.

Drupal gives you plenty of customization, as well, but it seems to be easier to use WordPress when you want to change colors, add images, change the layout, add sidebars and more. Many of the tools provides by WordPress make it much easier than the options given to users of Drupal.

Other Things to Consider

When looking at WordPress vs Drupal, you can look at many of other numbers to understand why WordPress is the better choice. The size of the community makes a big difference, which WordPress has a community much larger than Drupal. WordPress has over 100,000 Twitter followers and over 250,000 Facebook fans, whereas Drupal only has 21,000 Twitter followers and about 20,000 Facebook fans.

When looking at the total number of users, it’s clear WordPress is much larger. Drupal takes about 1.6% of the top million websites using a CMS, while WordPress takes 14.3%. This just goes to show how large the support community is for WordPress compared to Drupal.

The Bottom Line

With better SEO, more features, a larger community and an easier platform for beginners, it’s clear that the winner between Drupal vs. WordPress is WordPress. This CMS wins in every category and the numbers don’t lie. It’s preferred by more user than any other CMS for many reasons.

When you choose the top CMS online today, you get the best possible platform for your website and blog. Of course, Drupal has its place and there’s a reason why some of the top sites choose Drupal over WordPress. However, many other large sites, such as The Ford Story, WSJ.com, Time and MTV Newsroom.

If you’re an advanced user, Drupal might be the better choice, but WordPress gives you far better options and a larger community. Beginners should certainly choose WordPress and most advanced users will prefer the customization of WordPress over Drupal.

Whenever comparing the foundation of your website, you need to look at all the features, capabilities and the ease of use. If you plan to manage the site yourself, it’s important to choose the CMS best fit with your skills. Those without much technical knowledge will fit best with WordPress. Drupal has its advantages, but it’s harder to learn and requires a certain technical knowledge to grasp.

The majority of blog owners and webmasters use WordPress because Google, Yahoo and Bing absolutely love WordPress sites. They prefer a clean site that’s easy for the user to navigate. WordPress provides exactly that type of site with full customization.
Along with the many benefits of using WordPress, hiring a designer to create a WordPress site is far cheaper than a Drupal site. Drupal sites usually run well over $1,000, whereas a good WordPress site will only cost a few hundred dollars. The debate between WordPress vs. Drupal isn’t a contest and for 95% of users, WordPress is the correct choice.

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