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Wordpress vs Drupal – Which One To Pick?
Tips

Wordpress vs Drupal – Which One To Pick?

by Adrian Ababei on Oct 04 2016

There’s an age-old battle going on between the best platforms to build your website: Wordpress vs Drupal vs Joomla. Today we’ll tackle just the first two and compare some of their features in order to help you with your decision. Remember, picking the right platform for your website is essential since you’re likely to invest a lot of time and effort into it. If you already picked a platform, you can also read more about our top 8 Drupal web development tools.

 

In the late 2000s Wordpress was the preferred choice for most online projects, e-commerce websites, personal blogs and the preferred platform for web development companies. Back then websites featured minimal content types and most pages featured just a content block with a few buttons. Nowadays, times have changed and web development is becoming more and more focused on user experience than simplicity – this means more content types, more features and plenty of attention to the user interface.

These needs made Drupal so popular in recent years – here are a few things that need to be mentioned in the Wordpress vs Drupal battle.

 

Wordpress vs Drupal – Security concerns

The biggest difference in the Wordpress vs Drupal analysis is security. Plenty of government websites are built in Drupal simply because it offers site scale and enterprise-level security. Even Whitehouse.gov is built with Drupal.

On the other hand, Wordpress offers limited security as hackers can use vulnerabilities from plugins to crack their way through and wipe your website – most vulnerabilities take place at the server level. Drupal features a few notable hosting applications that help manage any security risks, Pantheon and Acquia.

 

Wordpress vs Drupal – Responsive development & design

The first thing you need to figure out when it comes to responsive development and responsive design is how your images are managed – your images won’t necessarily scale perfectly when viewed on different screen sizes. Both Drupal and Wordpress offer solutions to making images responsive but the solutions are different.

When working with Drupal, you can set your images sizes from the admin panel with the use of the Image Style module. The advantage here is that you don’t have to modify your PHP files to set your sizes. Both Wordpress and Drupal are designed agnostic which means you’ll pretty much build your themes however you want. You can try a starter responsive theme which can help speed up your workflow.

 

Wordpress vs Drupal – Mobile development and mobile themes

If you plan on having a dedicated mobile theme for your website, both platform offer starter themes to help you along. There are plenty of Drupal mobile themes available on drupal.org and as for WordPress, WPTouch is the norm.

Now, the biggest difference between Wordpress vs Drupal is how the content is handled on mobile devices – When using Drupal you can create other content fields for a page that will simply display when viewed from a mobile device.

It’s also worth stating that you should place your Drupal mobile theme in a sub-domain such as m.drupaldomain.com - Wordpress mobile themes can run on the same subdomain.

Content editing on mobile is rather easier with Wordpress, making it an excellent choice for blogs and other personal websites.

 

Wordpress vs Drupal – SEO concerns

Neither platform has a definite advantage when the website is built following the SEO best practices. Here are a few aspects you should keep in mind with regards to SEO:

  • Content Delivery Networks can be used for both platforms
  • Schemas can be added to Wordpress and Drupal as well
  • Page loading time – Drupal’s default caching feature is very powerful and it doesn’t require any additional alterations – Wordpress needs to use caching plugins.

 

Wordpress vs Drupal – Upgrading

With WordPress, your database will require an upgrade which can be done in the background. Your code is upgradable as well. A new version of Wordpress is released every couple of months but that’s not the problem – your plugins may not be upgraded that often which in turn can lead to security risks or lack of functionality in your website.

With Drupal the code is not upgradable but the database is – upgrading from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, for example, may require a re-design. Your database content can be migrated to a newer version but the code will most likely need to be rewritten.

 

Conclusions

In the end, the Wordpress vs Drupal argument ends with the customer’s demands – your demands. Do you need different content types and different page templates? Do you need enterprise-level security? Do you need a small website or a larger, robust site with plenty of security and different user permissions?

Given these aspects, Wordpress is more suited to small websites and blogging websites while Drupal is recommended for larger projects with multiple authors and a need for tight security.

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The Complete Website UX Audit Checklist for 2020: 12 Steps to Uncover Usability Issues on Your Site

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Source: process.st Let's go back to the example above: You notice that visitors on your website keep abandoning their shopping cart.  In this case, a website UX audit might uncover specific flaws in the customer journey responsible for this low conversion rate: confusing navigation structure cluttered screens a too complicated checkout process an inconsistent visual style across pages not enough payment options In other words: A UX audit helps you identify all those usability challenges with a direct impact on users' experience. key elements on your website that are too hard to find ... or too hard to use the workflow users are to perform is not that obvious and intuitive And it helps you find your answers to legitimate questions like: What is working and what isn't? What metrics are your collecting and what metrics should you be collecting? What does the gathered data tell you about your website users' needs? Why do they behave the way they do and how might they behave once you've taken follow-up action? In short: a UX audit provides you with those metrics which, once turned into updates to your website, help you boost conversions. Step 1: Run Stakeholder Interviews and User Surveys Start off by talking to your: development team, the one in charge with all the UX improvements on your website; ask them about their development challenges, future plans with the company website, and specific requirements for achieving those plans marketing team and salespeople, who might already have their own user survey results collected along the years Then, run your own updated user surveys and categorize results by: task severity findings per screen  Tip! Run usability tests to filter through the qualitative data collected on these interviews and surveys. For instance, users might report a discouragingly complex checkout process. A usability test will confirm or disprove this claim. Step 2: Create Your User Persona- A Key Point in the Website UX Audit Checklist Who are you improving your website UX for? And there are different types of users visiting your website and each user type stands for a unique way that you could improve the user experience delivered there. To narrow down your options, you need to figure out who's the most representative user for your website.  Remember to add these 3 key attributes to your user persona as you're building its profile: user goals: do they align with your business goals? needs: what does he/she try to accomplish when visiting your website? frustrations: things to avoid when designing this user persona's experience on your website Tip! Bring your business goals (that we'll be focusing on at Step 3) into the picture, as they'll help you determine who your user persona is. 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Just drop us a line and let's uncover all the opportunities for UX optimization on your website! Image by Mudassar Iqbal from Pixabay     ... Read more
Adriana Cacoveanu / Jul 01'2020
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How to Improve Internal Site Search and Boost Your Conversion Rate in 12 Easy Steps

How to Improve Internal Site Search and Boost Your Conversion Rate in 12 Easy Steps

They're not there for the looks, you know. Users come to your website to search for... something — a product, a service, information. Its role is to make it easy for them to find that "something" via its search engine. But how to improve internal site search and "shorten the time between query to conversion"? What are some best practices when adding search functionality to your website so that: it serves up the most relevant search results? it reduces user-friction? it provides the best search experience? it helps users to convert faster? Here's your 13-step checklist to an effective on-site search: Why Site Search Is Important?   "Adding on-site search to your website increases conversions by 480%!" (Neil Patel).  Just think about it: The user's found your website (your SEO efforts have paid off). It's something specific that he's looking. Or he at least has some idea of the type of products/services that he's there for. 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DrupalDrupal 8Tips
Drupal Performance Optimization: 17 Drupal Caching Best Practices To Speed Up Your Page Load Time- Part 2

Drupal Performance Optimization: 17 Drupal Caching Best Practices To Speed Up Your Page Load Time- Part 2

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Silviu Serdaru / Jun 23'2020

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