WordPress vs. Drupal – What to choose for 2021?

• WordPress

Initially introduced in 2003 as a blogging platform, WordPress is now a prevalent name in the market of CMS. WordPress allows you to shuffle through readymade themes available for website development, which will enable you to save cost and time when developing a website for any business.

Website development has become an essential aspect of any business and organization in the digital landscape. Dedicated developer understands the website is about designed and involves driving business KPWs, improving revenues, brand awareness, and other factors.

• Drupal

Drupal is the CMS solution for businesses looking to develop complex websites that have a scope of expansion in the future. It is a free, open-source CMS platform that allows developers to build complex website projects. Drupal web developers use the platform to create blogs, personal websites, social networking sites, and customer forums for businesses and individuals. Additionally, Drupal supports several other functionalities like content management, podcasts, collaborative authoring, image galleries, and many more.

Features:

WordPress

• Hide Functionality

WordPress allows you to display or hide items on the screen in the current view of Drupal web developers. You can change this in the admin area with the screen options button. This particular functionality of WordPress allows editing the screen to match the workflow of the admin pages. 

• Widget Editing

On the dashboard page of WordPress, users can see several shortcuts to different sections of the website. There are different boxed sections known as the dashboard widget that can be hidden, displayed, and even deleted if necessary. According to their convenience, users can also drag and drop these boxes to rearrange them in the dashboard.

• URL in Visual Editor

The visual editor allows you to paste links directly by selecting texts without opening any pop up to paste the links. The visual editor converts the links automatically.

• Accessibility

WordPress allows you to drag and drop widgets into sidebars for integration, making it easy for users. WordPress has hidden accessibilities that will enable easy editing and moving of all widgets.

• Preview

WordPress themes are essential for businesses to understand the different sections of the website. WordPress allows you to install any new theme on the theme page and preview it through the live preview option on the theme thumbnail. This will launch the theme and show you a preview of how the website looks with a new theme.

• Editing Images

WordPress makes it easy to add images in posts and pages. WordPress also allows basic image editing features for images like cropping, resize, and rotations.

• Multiple Pages

WordPress allows you to add <!-next page-> tag to a post to divide a long post into several pages. This helps avoid scrolling on pages and splits them into two pages effortlessly.

Drupal

• Fields

The new field types in Drupal are email, reference, links, etc.

• Quick Edits

Drupal modules allow looking through content and let you edit text directly from the frontend of the website development platform.

• Responsive Image

Drupal automatically resizes images according to the theme or website design.

• Multiple-language support

Drupal supports four key modules that help in translating website content to different languages. The process has become smoother with Drupal 8 and supports all major languages automatically.

• Configuration Manager

The configuration module of Drupal makes it easier to import and export the essential features of the developed website.

Which is better?

• Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is an essential aspect of any website development to improve SERP ranks. WordPress and Drupal are great at handling SEO as long as the content provided on the website is created in accordance with the SEO regulations. WordPress has dedicated plugins for all its SEO services that can help optimize a website and handle the SEO accordingly. At the same time, Drupal has Yoast SEO software that adds SEO-friendly features to a website.

In prospects of SEO, WordPress is a winner as it uses several plugins that ensure the high website ranks in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

• Security

Security is an essential aspect of all website development and needs to be taken care of with absolute discretion. Drupal has a robust and secure website development. On the other hand, WordPress has several potential security practices and plugins that help overcome all security issues during website development.

If compared directly, WordPress and Drupal require plugins and themes that can handle online vulnerability. WordPress still has a few security patches that can compromise a few sections of website development. Drupal is a complete winner as it supports several plugins and themes that provide a secure platform and absolute protection from all online threats.

• Responsive Design and Development

One of the most critical aspects of design and development is resizing the images through the CMS tool. Responsive design does not automatically scale images correctly, and while both CMS platforms have appropriate responsive design solutions, they have different approaches.

In WordPress, image size breaks are declared through function.php, while Drupal uses an image style module to resize images for responsive designs. Drupal takes more setup time but is done through the admin and not through PHP files.

Additionally, both CMS platforms have plugins and modules that provide extensive legacy support that allows you to regenerate previous images. If you are building a new theme, the tools will automatically generate new ideas and develop related thumbnail plugins through the tools.

As for the actual design aspect of responsive designs, both CMS platforms are agonistic and allows you to design your templates in any way you like. Both CMS platforms have primary starter responsive themes that can accelerate the development time.

• Scalability

WordPress has several plugins and themes that are available in free and premium versions that help extent functionalities. These themes and plugins help you create websites like e-commerce stores, portfolios, news websites, and many more.

Drupal has extensions and modules that help extend the functionalities but comes with certain limitations. Drupal expects more effort to develop knowledge for website development, even for basic single-page websites.

WordPress is a more comfortable platform when it comes to development and design for basic websites. This gives WordPress an edge in the competition between Drupal and WordPress.

Choosing a website development platform in 2021 is difficult when you have to choose between Drupal and WordPress. Although both have their advantages and disadvantages, the deciding factor rests upon your business requirements and expectations from the website.