Drupal Vs WordPress - Could Drupal Become The Next WordPress?

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• Could Drupal Become The Next WordPress?

Blog URL https//www.cloudways.com/blog/drupal-th
e-next-wordpress/
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Ah, here we are. Back to the CMS battle. And what
better candidates to pick for this battle than
Drupal and WordPress. Both are immensely powerful
with different strengths. On the surface, both
may look the same. However, if you dig deeper,
youll start to notice that they lie at the
opposing sides of the user preference
spectrum.In these slides, I will take a look at
the differences as well as the future of these
two CMS. Lets start.
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1) SEOIts no coincidence that the first
topic Ive picked for the battle between these
two is SEO. Search engine optimization is
probably the wheels that make the internet run.
With the omnipresent search engines being the
most important websites on the internet right
now, its vital that your website ranks higher up
in SERP. This is an essential element of
improving websites reach and visibility.Note
that I wont go into the details of modules and
plugins and will only highlight the bare basics
of both the CMS.DrupalRight out-of-the-box,
there can be no doubt that Drupal is much more
SEO friendly than WordPress. For example, it
supports native caching which enables it to be
very fast, an important consideration for high
SERP position. By adding modules to the mix, this
advantage is further enhanced, taking Drupal
further up the SEO ladder.WordPressOut-of-the
box, there arent any native WordPress SEO
functionalities. However, youre not exactly
doomed in the SERP competition. Some excellent
modules such as YOAST SEO plugins can make your
WordPress website a lot more SEO friendly.
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2) PerformanceDrupalThis is yet another
feature where Drupal takes the lead. As I pointed
out in the last section, native caching
capability makes Drupal websites faster. Not only
this but since Drupal allows you to tinker with
the core, a good programmer can wring out a lot
more of performance boost from your Drupal
website. It is also worth noting that Drupal
mainly caters to the enterprise market, and as
such, it is well suited to handle websites with a
large volume of data and thousands of pages. A
well managed Drupal website rarely goes down and
slow downs are rare events.WordPressEven
though WordPress falls behind Drupal in this
department, it still isnt any slouch. Although
the point to be noted here is that you will have
been on top of your WordPress websites
management to ensure it stays optimized and no
theme or plugin slows down the speed.
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3) Ease of Use Drupal Ease-of-use is one
area where Drupal is often placed second to
WordPress. However, there is a pretty good reason
for this Drupal has focused on experienced
enterprise level users rather than lay users. The
learning curve is much steeper than WordPress. It
is to be noted, however, that Drupal has slowly
been adding features that enable it to be more
user-friendly. Things like an easier setup of
modules, themes, and content are paving the way
towards a more user-friendly Drupal. WordPress On
e of the main reasons for WordPress immense
popularity is its ease of use and the overall CMS
structure that is designed for average users. On
the surface, WordPress is a lot more
user-friendly and a lot less complex than Drupal.
However, everything that sparkles isnt a
diamond, and the user-friendliness of WordPress
comes at the cost of customization issues. Since
WordPress main aim is to cater to individuals
and newbies, several areas of the WordPress core
are locked. For experienced developers, this is a
major obstacle in customizing the core platform
to the projects requirements.
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4) Updates and Upgrades Drupal Drupal always
have problems in this area simply because it
doesnt support automatic updates of the
database. This means that every major update adds
significant changes to the codebase of the CMS
without doing much for the database. The biggest
example of this being Drupal 8, that was such a
massive change that many Drupal loyalists opted
to leave the ecosystem altogether. However, ever
since, Drupal has been slowly but surely making
its update and upgrade system better and merging
the update and upgrade paths. This way, the minor
updates of version 8 will be automatically
upgraded when the new version 9 rolls
out. WordPress WordPress has a great update and
upgrade systems that ensure that all new major
and minor versions are seamlessly integrated with
the existing core. The changes to the code and
the database happen in the background and all the
user sees is a notification when the new changes
have been integrated successfully (or
unsuccessfully!).
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5) Security Drupal Its time for Drupal to take
the lead back from WordPress in this last
section. When it comes to security, Drupal is the
king! This is why Drupal powers a significant
number of government websites throughout the
world. Security is the reason why high-profile
websites such as The White House and The
Economist prefer Drupal. The cherry on top of the
cake is that Drupal is very secure right out of
the box, so you do not have to waste hundreds of
man-hours on beefing up the security
measures. WordPress WordPress lags behind Drupal
in the security department by quite a margin. A
simple Google search for WordPress attacks or
WordPress vulnerabilities turns up a lot of
incidents of WordPress websites being
compromised. This is mainly due to the huge
library of plugins and themes, were bad code goes
unnoticed until a security breach occurs.
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Final Verdict So, what are the takeaways from
this comparison? Well, Drupal is leading
WordPress in most of the major departments, with
the ease of use being the only major point going
for WordPress. Id say that with so many new
features being added to Drupal, and with the
feedback from the community being taken into
consideration, Drupal only needs to work on
making its learning curve shallower in order to
be more accessible to newbies. If it can do that,
it wont be long before Drupal becomes the choice
of CMS for non-technical people in addition to
the technical ones, see Why Drupal Should Power
Your Next Web Project.