Migration from WordPress to Drupal: what makes it a great choice
The joy and excitement of packing your luggage and moving to a better place are similar to those you experience during website migration. The changes will be amazing, but you need to do everything carefully to avoid leaving anything behind. As experienced “moving specialists,” we have shared posts about migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8, as well as from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. What about making a further move and changing the CMS, if the existing CMS just does not fulfill your needs any longer? A cool example of this is a migration from WordPress to Drupal. Let’s discuss what benefits such a move could give to you.
WordPress and Drupal: alike and different
Though Drupal and WordPress are known rivals in website development, they share the same achievement — namely, they have allowed millions of websites to be created and managed more easily. That’s what CMSs, or content management systems, are designed for.
Drupal and WordPress are both free, popular, open-source PHP-based CMSs. They both have extensive developer communities willing to respond to various issues and provide documentation. So what inspires customers to migrate from WordPress to Drupal? Let’s see.
Reasons to migrate from WordPress to Drupal
WordPress started as a blogging platform, and it has become popular due to its unmatched simplicity. It’s really easy to set up simple websites with it and use them straight away. That’s why WordPress has so quickly gained its impressive market share of 40%.
However, if your ambitions reach beyond a simple website — like business card sites or a blog — Drupal certainly deserves more of your attention.
Drupal has thousands of free modules to extend the basic functionality of your site. Actually, there are a few more plugins for this purpose in WordPress, but many of them must be purchased. Mostly standard features are available for free, the rest can vary.
And though the learning curve is steeper with Drupal, you can create much more with it. It has been made by developers and for developers, and the other side of the complexity coin is more advanced functionality.
Saying that Drupal is more complicated for non-developers is also relative. The interface is intuitively understandable, and numerous initiatives by the Drupal community make it more and more handy for users, especially in Drupal 8.
Those who dive into the possibilities of Drupal interface alone, even without coding, are impressed with what it lets them do. So the moment of confusion is more of an embarrassment of riches.
Drupal and WordPress are traditionally called CMSs, but Drupal has now evolved to be a CMF (content management framework), which is the next level — it means the sky’s the limit to what can be created.
The “blogging platform” past of WordPress becomes noticeable also when it comes to handling large websites with lots of pages and users. The prize here goes to Drupal, which is more robust. Great caching features are provided in Drupal out-of-box, and WordPress needs additional plugins for that.
In the security field, Drupal wins completely. This is due to a strong security team, constant security updates, quick fixes of any possible vulnerabilities, strict rules for presenting contributed modules to drupal.org and much more. A great proof of this is that government websites in many counties trust Drupal (see examples).
Drupal 8: the latest and tastiest
The eighth version of Drupal is especially powerful, to the point that it’s almost impossible to walk by. It has unprecedented multilingual capacities, a mobile-first approach, a new level of web accessibility, easy content editing, modern and clean markup with HTML5, Symphony components, powerful Commerce 2.0 for online stores, and much more.
Wrap-up
Maybe it’s time to move on and ask for more. Migration from WordPress to Drupal will be performed carefully and smoothly by our experienced team — just contact us. Let your new choice be lucky!