Should Your Association Migrate to WordPress?
WordPress is the new creation giant, dominating the market with its popularity and numerous attractive features. It always renews the debate of Drupal VS WordPress for people looking to establish their site or migrate it.
Since modern business solutions demand a cyber business card in the form of a website’s success, it becomes more crucial to look into Drupal and WordPress’s comparison. It is well known that WordPress has a more significant share of the CMS hosted real estate market, at around 28%, while Drupal has a share of 4.7%. This may be enough reason to convert from Drupal to WordPress, but the worth behind WordPress’s popularity should be studied.
Why should Associations Migrate from Drupal to WordPress?
Both the competing software specializes in a similar concept: to provide a flexible and powerful platform for users to build a personalized website without developing a CMS structure from the ground-up.
The sites built on these platforms are free to integrate third-party Association Management Systems SEO with all the site’s functionalities. Along with this, they can enjoy a wholly customizable and finished website that looks and works professionally, contributing to the business broadly. Here are some differentiation areas to look out for:
1. Usability and Learning Curve
WordPress is well-known for its ease of use and access. You could find a theme suiting your niche and have a site up and running within a day unless you plan on a vast and integrated website. The interface is simple enough for beginners and casual users to understand, and the tools available make content creating an easy task.
The experience with Drupal, on the other hand, is the opposite. Most of the themes available are custom-coded or highly customized. First-time or casual users may need the help of a developer to create a good-looking website.
While the Drupal interface is functional at a basic level, it is not as user-friendly as WordPress. The latter is more accessible for web content managers, whereas Drupal has a robust framework.
2. Set-Up and Maintenance
Since WordPress has a bigger user base, it naturally has more forums, developers, blogs, and general guides available online. More developers would know about this CMS’s workings compared to the one’s knowledge about Drupal. This also means that hiring a WordPress developer would be cheaper.
When it comes to updates, WordPress updates every quarter. The themes, plugins, and the codes never miss any updates, since the “automatic upgrade” feature is always functional. On the other hand, Drupal’s updates may get complicated. There is no coding provided for the upgrade features, which would make you pay for a developer to figure it out.
3. SEO and Cost
Your website can be ‘extended’ by including add-ons, known as plugins in WordPress and modules in Drupal. The number of plugins available is far more than the modules, which shows that Drupal has fewer user-acclaimed SEO modules. This is because Drupal tends to focus on scalability, instead of ranking.
However, ranking is required if you are operating a business with search ranking as part of its marketing strategy. In this case, a Drupal to WordPress migration is necessary.
When it comes to the cost, both-*/CMS platforms are free to install and use. The expenses would start once you add customized features to your site and the developer’s inclusion. On an average monthly basis, you would be spending $1000 for WordPress and $2500 for Drupal.
4. Security
WordPress core assures complete security, but the majority of its working depends on third-party extensions. This makes it more vulnerable since plugins have accounted for more than half of hackers’ known entry points.
Security is one of Drupal’s selling factors, so much that government organizations trust Drupal for their site creation and management. With its enterprise-level security, it also publishes detailed security reports, making it much more transparent than WordPress.
5. Accessibility
In the era of smartphones, having an app that runs smoothly on all hand-held devices is a must. Around 80% of internet users are accessing it through their phones and tablets. WordPress gets you covered, with your administrative editorial dashboard available through its mobile app. Drupal does not have a mobile application, although the company claims that it has not completed its development.
Advantages in Brief
In short, benefits for both the platforms can be listed as:
1. WordPress
- Extensibility without custom developments
- Ease of use
- Can get help easily
- Lower Development Costs
2. Drupal
- Build-in control system
- Flexible taxonomy system
- Custom content types
- Core multilingual support
Conclusion
Drupal is a learned developer’s dream, but not all businessmen know coding. WordPress is the default solution for creating a website, with everything made easier and customizable to the same levels of Drupal. For finding the comfort of functionality, maintenance, access, and cost, you should migrate your website to WordPress.
