WordPress vs Drupal The Battle of Titans!
WP Vs Drupal – Which one to Choose?
WordPress vs Drupal, well they are two of the most commonly popular content management systems available on earth. Both are free and open source; are far better than the conventional closed source options; both are developed in PHP, and both are supported by vast and active communities. So how will I go about choosing one over the other? Choosing any one out of them is considered to be a win-win situation; thus, there is no clear winner as such. The solution is – your needs, your choice! Only you can make the choice based on your needs; but an objective review and comparison will certainly be of help!
What this means in Marketing terms
Drupal is one of the most popular content management system with WordPress dominating the landscape with more than 42% market share. WP has been here for a long time, and has made life easier for everyone, making it such a giant. But Drupal has been catching up at a fast pace because of a number of advantages. Compared to WP, Drupal is more extensible and more suitable for the enterprise. This means that it must be the better choice when it comes to larger websites. That is what it seems like, but it can be a little tricky! “Large” here stands for traffic, with blogs being some of the highest traffic generators. Making a direct choice of good and bad between WordPress and Drupal can be quite complex!
Why WordPress?

WordPress is the easiest among all CMS’s to use and if you want to develop a blog or website or a combination of the duo, there is almost no better option. It is based on simple technology and it is quite easy to add content – pages, posts, images or videos.
It is browser based, allowing anyone to login from any system and manage their site from anywhere. No need to learn HTML or how to use FTP! All the required tools are at your behest and most importantly, search engines love WP sites.
Easy to Learn
When pitted against Drupal, WP is easier to learn! Drupal is your technical system and the tools can be a little complicated to use. With WordPress, you can have a blog built into your site, making it easy and fast to add content.
100% Customizable Sites
There are 1000’s of free/paid themes and plugins in WP that make your website 100% customizable. It is also possible to create profiles with multiple levels of access for different types of users.
Why Drupal?
Drupal is unique in itself and despite being relatively technical, there are many reasons why we would want to choose it! There are some quality modules with clean looks that make it easy to build and manage websites and content.
High Performance
If there is one thing where Drupal seems to have the edge, it is in terms of performance. It is designed for high performance, having built-in databases, caching and InnoDB. It is also possible to integrate third party apps like REST, JSON and SOAP.
Build Any Type of Site
The extremely powerful framework allows us to build almost any type of website. But there is a catch to it – it may not be the best platform for beginners. WP may make it easy to customize sites using the large variety of themes and plugins, but even in WordPress, advanced customization could be challenging.
Let’s compare WP and Drupal on the basis of 3 important factors that cannot be ignored in the current scenario – Security, Mobile Design and SEO! This may help us judge the winner.
Security
Drupal offers enterprise-level security. The people at White House are really serious about protecting their site from hackers in China and Russia! This is the reason many government sites including WhiteHouse.gov are developed on Drupal! On the other hand, it is relatively easier for hackers to explore vulnerabilities within plugins.
Responsive Design
Both WordPress and Drupal provide solutions for responsive images, but they follow different pathways. In WP, the images sizes per break points are detailed out in functions.php. In Drupal it is possible to change the image sizes within the admin through the Image Style module. It may take some time to setup but it could be done without getting into the php files.
Both the CMS’s, however, offer plugins/modules that offer legacy support so that you can regenerate the previously generated photos. When it comes to “designing”, both allow you to design templates as per your requirements. They come with starter responsive themes that help speed up the development time. Do prefer designing in the browser? You can choose any of them!
Mobile Development
Both the CMS’s have some great starter mobile themes to put your site on the marketplace fast. While WPTouch is a proven solution, Drupal offers many mobile starter themes for the purpose. But both WP and Drupal are different in the way they handle content for mobile. The latter allows us to have more content fields to display on each mobile page.
Most mobile themes run better of a sub-domain, but this comes with some challenges about mobile indexation. On the other hand, WP mobile themes could be run off the same sub-domain that doesn’t create any problems with search engine.
Mobile Content Editing
WordPress is the winner when it comes to editing content on mobile. It has a native app, which Drupal fails to have, allowing you to update blogs in real time. Drupal on the other hand provides a solution in the form of its admin which provides a decent mobile first strategy.
WordPress Vs Drupal on SEO
If your website was developed using best practices, it will not be possible to tell whether search engines side with WP or Drupal. But WordPress seems to have an edge here. With WP, we are less likely to make any errors, but the same is not always true when it comes to developing Drupal sites.
When it comes to page load times, Drupal has robust default caching features, but WP requires using caching plugins. The same process is involved in both WP and Drupal for adding Schemas – adding to views or hard-coding into template files. There are many other similarities between the two, and it could be quite complex to tell which one stands to have the edge.
Overall, it can be summed up that while WordPress is more suitable for beginners (and advanced users too!), the features of Drupal are inclined more towards the experienced users!