Choose Your CMS: Drupal 8 vs. WordPress

Though WordPress's easy setup has made quite a name, the Open Source CMS is still far from perfect. There are instances where Open Source users prefer Drupal as their CMS of choice for the advantages it offers. 

For those who are new to the world of CMSs, WordPress is often the natural choice as it is easy to get started with. For those who would like to level up and need more customized functionality from their websites, Drupal meets these needs well. 

Drupal Vs. WordPress

Both at par with strong arguments at their corners, Drupal and WordPress have often locked horns in the CMS space. In fact, this is one of the most searched topics online among users who are wanting to enter into the Open Source space. And since pros and cons vary depending on the user’s context, there is never a clear winner. 

Let’s first look at the advantages Drupal offers over WordPress. 

Advantages of Drupal 8

• High Security: This is the foremost reason for migrating to Drupal. Several government websites, including the White House’s official website, have been built on Drupal.
• Easy Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Drupal is a good choice for businesses wanting their websites to rank via SEO. The platform offers numerous modules like Yoast SEO and makes it easy to optimize the site's content.  
• Speed: A crucial element in holding your audience’s attention is speed. Drupal extends maximum response speed, allowing users to develop high-performing pages with a high-speed index.
• Flexibility: More choices mean more flexibility to up your website game. Drupal’s custom content types are flexible and make your site unique. As a user, you can employ delicate detailing and integrate useful functions such as Shopify, Twitter, other social media channels, and more to achieve better results. 
• Multilingual: Since Drupal 8, the multilingual function has been baked into the core itself. For organizations wanting polylingual pages, Drupal offers 100+ languages in its base settings. And as commonly observed, multilingual sites perform much better than websites having English as their primary language. 
• Taxonomy: Data is the topmost priority for every website owner. From In-depth nesting to categorizing in a common data catalog, Drupal can reliably store a large amount of data. Such capabilities are still not available in other Open Source CMSs.

Advantages of WordPress

According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 37 percent of all the websites on the Internet. Clearly, it is one of the most sought after CMS for enterprises wanting to start up their websites quickly. Let’s look at its advantages:

• Ease of Use: If you are a non-technical user, WordPress can give your business a good kickstart. It can take you from no website to a good-looking, user-friendly, and functional site in minutes.  
• Extensibility: With 53,000+ free plugins and 5,000+ free themes, you can transform your website at no extra cost. It’s easy to extend your WordPress site without the need for custom development.
• Development Costs: WordPress tends to work great for categories like small-to-medium businesses, eCommerce, publications, startups, and nonprofits. WordPress can address these needs at lower development costs. 

While these advantages take over Drupal, there are a few that both the platforms share equally. For example, both Drupal and WordPress offer eCommerce capabilities and are redesigned to be more platform-agnostic. Similarly, you can decouple Drupal as well as WordPress. The drupal site can act as a content API server on the first day itself, while REST API is now bundled in the WordPress core for developers to experiment and use it in a decoupled way.

If you are a small business, WordPress might be the solution for you, but Drupal offers significant advantages for large enterprises. In case you are one of the latter, the next section will guide you through the migration process. 

Migrate to Drupal

Here’s how you can migrate your site to Drupal in a few easy steps:

• Download the XML file containing “All content” after you log in to WordPress Admin. 
• Make sure that the XML file is valid using xmllint through the command line. Then make appropriate fixes to the XML file and run xmllint again to ensure that all errors have been rectified.
• Use the WordPress Migrate module or any other appropriate module to migrate.
• Log in to Drupal and navigate to the Find Content screen and click on the WordPress Migration tab.
• Select the valid XML file that you saved earlier.
• Make sure that the data was properly imported and everything is in place. 

Supporting Modules

While these steps will execute the migration successfully, there are other aspects to consider, like exporting content files, URLs, extra files, etc. 

Modules can assist you in completing the migration from WordPress to Drupal:

You are at your discretion to choose between the two leading CMSs. Both platforms have their sets of advantages, as listed above. In case you are still confused, get details on how Drupal 8 changed the WordPress Vs. Drupal debate.