Cause Inspired Media Recommends WordPress Over Drupal
At Cause Inspired Media, our marketing strategies are primarily meant to operate in the digital realm. The very nature of digital advertising implies that our clients must have a website at their domain name so that our campaigns can operate. For this reason, Cause Inspired Media’s team includes a Senior Web Developer, Project Architect, and a Senior Software Developer with decades of combined experience in professional, ‘full-stack’ web development and design. Our team of experienced web developers work with our nonprofit clients to create affordable, user-friendly, responsive websites that help drive donations and achieve their goals.
At Cause Inspired Media, our team understands that there are many platforms from which to build a website. Some of the most common platforms we see clients using are WordPress and Drupal. While both tools are effective, we recommend using WordPress to build your nonprofit’s website. According to our Senior Web Developer, Amy Gress,
When it comes to the basic user, WordPress is hands down more user-friendly and easier to use for website management. It gives much more flexibility to the common user. Additionally, because of the extensibility and architecture that WordPress is built with, the development of a WordPress website is going to be faster and more intuitive, which leads to lower costs.
Let’s break this down:
Ease of use
Compared with Drupal and most other website development platforms, WordPress is significantly easier for users to navigate and website owners to manage. The level of difficulty and overwhelming administration interface of Drupal is one of the main reasons that it is not as widely-used as WordPress.
Extensibility & Lower Development Costs
WordPress’s thousands of themes and plugins make it easy to extend without the need for extensive custom development, making it a more affordable yet flexible option. Because WordPress offers more ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions and extensions for developers, both simple and custom website solutions with WordPress development are typically more affordable than Drupal.
Functionality
The Drupal interface is incomprehensible for most casual users (and even many developers!), at least at first glance. This isn’t just our opinion, either. When referencing Drupal’s authoring experience, Drupal has a usability page that explains that, generally, people expect a much richer user experience when creating content than what Drupal offers. Much of the functionality that people consider standard for a CMS is completely missing from Drupal.
Hosting Costs
Using a WordPress hosting package is often significantly less expensive than Drupal. Most moderate hosting packages actually cost at least ten times more than what a WordPress hosting package would cost. Although the basic site requirements are the same for WordPress and Drupal, Drupal requires additional maintenance that comes with more expensive hosting packages.
Drupal’s setup is also typically slow and requires a decent amount of prior technical knowledge.This is because, post-installation, developers are required to add a long list of tools, including the content editor and other Admin tools. On the other hand, WordPress doesn’t require any setup post-installation (aside from themes and plugins), and requires less resources overall. All that WordPress requires is the specified PHP and MySQL setups. With the foolproof setup wizard, WordPress has simplified the website development process and improved overall speed.
Source Coding, Debugging, and SEO
When problems do occur, it is much easier to identify issues and adjust the code with WordPress than it is with Drupal. Drupal’s highly nested architecture with overlapping functionality makes it challenging and time consuming for developers to search for problems and modify code. More experience and expertise is also needed to configure SEO features with Drupal than with WordPress.
Although Drupal is a common tool used to build websites, many are realizing the challenges and are making the switch to WordPress. Because of this demand, it is important to ensure that your organization hires a skilled company or developer to make sure your site is migrated successfully. At Cause Inspired Media, our dedicated team of developers have decades of combined experience using both WordPress and Drupal. This ensures that our client’s websites are migrated seamlessly and at an affordable rate.
