Many enterprise owners wanting to start a website wonder whether to go Drupal or choose a different content management system. With factually hundreds of website content management systems available, you may be confused as to whether you should opt for Drupal or opt for another CMS like WordPress or Joomla. Just to mention, three content management systems stand out above the pool and they are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Drupal, being the third most used CMS distinguishes itself from the rest in its prowess to create advanced sites whereby it starts small and grows virtually without limitations.
When deciding on the content management system to use, there are important markers to look at including ease of use, performance, support, security, website cost, ability to customize, SEO and many others. Based on these parameters, some businesses may find Drupal the ideal CMS for their website, but others may choose others like Joomla and WordPress. To help determine if Drupal is the best CMS out there for business websites, let’s look at each of the markers and see how Drupal fares.
Cost and Expenses
When building a website, you want to consider the cost. The top three leading CMSs are open source and free for users. However, the fact that the developers provide free access to these CMSs, it doesn’t mean that you won’t spend a cent. You will need to pay for things like hosting and the creation of the website if you don’t have much knowledge about coding or programming languages. A domain name is also needed and will incur you additional costs. Drupal, as the third most used CMS, has been around for a long time compared to others like WordPress and Joomla. In fact, its first version was released in 2001 while Joomla was launched in 2005 and WordPress in 2003.
Designed for fast performance, Drupal has been the preferred choice for enterprise websites. Since it considered less hardware-hungry compared to other mainstream CMSs, it means that the server costs are cheaper. If you want to have premium themes, however, like in other platforms, you will have to pay for them. The cost of the premium themes for Drupal is almost that of the other leading CMS platforms. An important element to mention here about the cost is that unless you are a developer, you certainly need to hire dedicated Drupal experts when building a site with Drupal. The reason being, Drupal is regarded as the most complex among the leading CMSs. You therefore need to budget the development costs when building a site with Drupal. Otherwise, you will have to dig into learning the programming language, which though may save you money, it could take a lot of your time and delay the time of launching the site.
Ease of Use
The ease of use of a CMS is a main selling point. A majority of content management systems have allowed the less tech-savvy individuals to build websites without needing to have coding skills. Installing Drupal works almost the same as the leading CMSs. In addition, the content management system has what is called “distributions” that are simply Drupal versions of modules and extensions that are pre-installed. These distributions allow for easy building of some websites. There are a lot of options for customization of the CMS within the admin area giving the website users a lot of control over their sites. Although in the past, Drupal interface was regarded as the most sophisticated, in recent times, efforts have been made to simplify it.
That being said, Drupal is a technically advanced CMS solution meaning an individual building it will need to have a working known of HTML, PHP, and other languages to be able to make any purposeful changes like updating a site. A person is required to do code adjustments to allow existing website components be compatible with new versions. Sometimes, it may also be difficult to hand over a site to another client because of the need to have working knowledge of the programming language. However, with help of dedicated Drupal developer, you can overcome these challenges and have your site’s coding needs handled by the professionals.
Support Structures
With paid CMS solutions, they have clearly set support structures but open source solutions tend to lack that element because they have no single owner. To help bring up a support structure that you can rely on when you experience technical difficulties or if you have questions, a community support has been developed for Drupal, which includes user groups, support forums, and documentation. Although the community is smaller compared to WordPress and Joomla groups, it is active and welcoming. It will help you navigate the difficult parts of building your website with Drupal. Besides, the CMS comes with regular update cycles meaning users expect new versions that fix most bugs after every few months. Otherwise, when you encounter issues with your site, you can hire Drupal developer in India to help you.
Customizability of a Site
An interest thing about Drupal is that the CMS is all about building customized websites. It has many built-in options for customizing a site. A site builder can customize almost anything including editing files directly. In addition, Drupal, like many other mainstream CMSs, it has a healthy ecosystem with over 40,000 modules and in excess of 2,600 themes that help the web developer to add design options and functionality to a site.
Site Performance
A drawback for some CMSs like WordPress is the performance, and considering that businesses need to build websites that have high performance, Drupal takes an upper hand when it comes to this element. It’s a CMS that is touted as the one producing the fastest site loading time. The reason the CMS allows a site to load fast is because it’s less resource intensive. It is less demanding on a server. It is easier for a site built using Drupal to easily support simultaneous visitors and thousands of pages. Unless otherwise, or keeping other elements constant, you may not face many issues with site loading even when there are many requests or visitors visiting the site or when the site has so many pages. As a result, Drupal remains highly scalable and a popular choice for businesses with large websites. The CMS also has extensions to help add caching and other features to allow sites perform faster.
Website Security
Websites owners are pretty aware of the potential risks of running websites. While much of the website safety burden lies with hosting providers, the CMS you choose also has to address the issues of security.
Widely used CMSs like WordPress may be a target by hackers because of their popularity, but that doesn’t leave out others like Drupal or Joomla. One thing that makes Drupal stand out of major CMSs is that it takes security very serious. Whenever vulnerabilities are discovered, you get to know them on the Drupal’s official website. On top of that, patches follow pretty quickly after discovering the security loopholes. The CMS developers also offer extensions that make a user’s site safer – for instance; a module for creating security reports is available in the admin area or back-end. The module helps a site owner spot any site weaknesses and deal with them. Although Drupal has seen security troubles in the past like the SQL injection vulnerability witnessed in 2014 that resulted in hacking of many websites, the CMS continues to brace up and live up to its repute.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A main concern among website owners is SEO. While Google, the main search engine may not care about the content management system you use so long as it can deliver content understandable to the engine, it is still important that a user takes care of SEO elements when choosing a CMS.
Drupal offers SEO best practices that are built into it. There is a caching built in to allow faster page loading as well as meta tags to help with search engine optimization. The CMS platform has extensions that help a site owner in SEO. For example, there is the XML sitemap module or SEO checklist. Mobile responsible Drupal themes are available to ensure a user’s site appears better on tablets and phone screens.
Team Collaboration, Translation and Localization
Many businesses operate on an international market and they get visitors from different parts of the world. A CMS for a business website should be able to localize as well as translate the content to allow users read and understand it. Drupal is translated into different languages, you can run a site in your language while also being able to install more languages. Besides, part of the core goals of Drupal is being able to translate content without the need to install extensions.
When it comes to team collaboration, business websites and news sites have teams handling different aspects of a website at the same time. A CMS needs to offer tools that allow the teams to work together effectively. Drupal has collaboration tools and although it doesn’t have pre-set user roles, it allows users to make their own roles as well as control permissions for the various users independently.
The Wrap Up
Although Drupal commandeers about 2.2 percent of the overall CMSs market share with over 41 million websites already running the content management system in their background, it makes sense to say that it is an ideal choice for enterprises. Businesses need to have highly performing websites with strong security features. They need to have sites with faster loading speeds, and when you look at all these aspects, Drupal outperforms other mainstream CMSs like Joomla and WordPress. Businesses can count on this CMS to power their websites. With help of a Drupal web developer for hire, you can set up an enterprise website that performs great, takes care of security threats, and helps achieve your SEO goals.