Why Migrate from WordPress to Drupal
Choosing the right content management system (CMS) is more important than ever for marketers who prioritize security, scalability, and flexibility. While WordPress has long been a popular choice, recent lawsuits and controversies surrounding WordPress usage for organizations make Drupal 11 a powerful alternative that can meet the demands of modern, complex digital ecosystems. For marketers looking to create dynamic, secure, and customizable experiences, Drupal 11 offers advanced capabilities that enable a future-proof approach to content management.
If you have previously tried Drupal (especially before version 8), it is worth another look today, as many things have changed, and dozens of new features have been added.
Drupal’s Capabilities
If you’re familiar with WordPress, you’ll be pleased to know that Drupal has many of the same capabilities with countless improvements and features not found in WordPress.
Granular Access Control
With Drupal’s highly customizable access controls, role-based access policy (RBAC), and a policy-based access control (PBAC) API for custom rules, marketers can easily assign roles and permissions, enabling secure collaboration across teams without compromising sensitive information.
Flexible Content Modeling
Drupal provides unparalleled flexibility in creating and managing content structures, making it easier for marketers to design unique and engaging content layouts without technical limitations. Drupal has multiple page builder tools to suit different needs and preferences, like Layout Builder, Experience Builder, DXPR Builder, Layout Paragraphs, and even Gutenberg.
Seamless Integration with Marketing Tools
Drupal integrates smoothly with popular CRM, analytics, and marketing automation tools, helping marketers streamline workflows and gather meaningful insights across platforms.
Performance Optimization
Drupal’s caching systems and its commitment to performance improvements in Drupal help deliver faster page loads and better site performance for a seamless user experience.
Powerful Personalization and Content Targeting
Drupal’s framework supports advanced personalization features, allowing marketers to tailor content for specific audiences and improve engagement, all while securely managing user data.
Community-Driven Innovation and Support
First and foremost, Drupal is backed by a strong open-source community. The CMS is constantly evolving to meet the latest digital marketing trends and content management needs. This is due to the massive effort by the core and community developers to make it the best it can be. The community is warm, welcoming, and generous with their time to help and mentor others. Whether you are a marketer, site builder, developer, or other role, you can find a home in the community.
Enhanced Security Out of the Box
Drupal has long been renowned for its security-first approach, making it a go-to choice for industries that need rigorous data protection and compliance. Drupal 11 takes this further with built-in security features and regular updates from an active community of experts. Drupal has a security team responsible for researching and proactively implementing security measures for core and contributed modules, helping reduce Drupal’s vulnerability to exploits. This starkly contrasts WordPress, which has numerous exploits and common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) issued every year.
Modern Platform Architecture
Drupal's foundation is based on Symfony, a set of decoupled and reusable components on which the best PHP applications are built. This foundation on Symfony components makes Drupal easy to extend with custom features and modularize them to share between projects. It excels at adding new features quickly, integrating third-party APIs, and building reusable object-oriented code.
Scalability for Growing Marketing Needs
Drupal’s robust architecture easily handles high traffic, complex user interactions, and content-heavy websites. Its scalability ensures your site can expand along with your marketing ambitions.
Content Types
Modeling content and data in Drupal is very simple in the UI. Contrasted with coding scripts in WordPress to create new types of content, anyone with appropriate admin permissions in Drupal can define new types of content right in the user interface and quickly add fields and integrations. They can also dictate the look and feel of the input forms and content display with the layout builder, which are all in the same interface. This empowers site builders and content marketers to implement their content needs quickly for highly structured, well-defined content.
Fields & Fields UI
New types of content and data would be nothing without the fields and properties that define them. From plain text to date ranges, content references, WYSIWYG, and more, Drupal has dozens of field types to suit most needs. Like Content Types, adding fields can be done entirely in the admin interface and appear in forms automatically. Several contributed modules also add new field types to suit different needs beyond what comes out of the box.
Views
How many times have you wanted to have pages or components add dynamic lists of content items or provide searching capabilities? “Views” in Drupal is precisely that. Views allow you to quickly create arrangements and displays of content and control the pagination, filters, and other parameters to show what you want when you want. Views components can be displayed as standalone pages, placeable components within a page, RSS feeds, or even JSON/XML to act as feeds or API endpoints. You can think of Views as a visual SQL query builder — it enables anyone the ability to create dynamic outputs of their site’s data in custom displays and reports.
Forms
Every site generally needs to provide user-facing forms like “Contact Us” or more complex, step-by-step wizard form for online applications to services. Drupal has a module called ”Webform” that makes creating forms of very straightforward. You get complete control over the entire form process, including the inputs, grouping, wizard steps, confirmation messages, and dozens of other options. You can also submit and send emails, integrate with third-party services, or trigger remote API calls for integrations with CRM software like Salesforce or Marketo.
Creating forms is easy and comes with a various options, field types, validation rules, export and reporting capabilities, and more.
Metatag and Friendly URL Aliasing
Of course, a CMS is not complete without powerful SEO capabilities, and Drupal has several. Among them are Metatag, Real-time Yoast SEO, and Pathauto.
Metatags can be configured globally across different content types and pages to create deeper settings on a case-by-case basis. Once you have set them up, they are enabled sitewide and require no extra effort.
Pathauto allows you to set URL alias patterns for content types, taxonomy, media items, and more. It lets you create an alias using static and dynamic elements to keep your URLs human-readable yet unique. Vanity URLs can be set at the page level for special marketing needs. Along with the Redirect module, both modules can help your aliases be human readable, stay up to date automatically, and register a 301 redirect should the URL change so users do not reach a 404 page. This goes a long way toward SEO health and is easy to set up and manage.
Drupal AI
Lastly, Drupal has amazing integration for AI models, from the most popular providers like OpenAI and Google to smaller local tools like Ollama. Unlike WordPress, Drupal has a vast array of AI integrations for content editing, search augmentation, site-building tasks, site management, site monitoring, and more. This has put Drupal at the forefront of content management systems that can do more than just “complete text.” Drupal’s AI integration completely puts the power and capability into the site owner’s hands.
We have written about and demonstrated how AI can be used today in Drupal – since we actively took part in helping develop its features. Catch up with a few of these example articles:
Learn What Drupal Can Do For You
Interested in learning what Drupal can do for you and your organizations goals? Our Triple Certified Drupal Expert can help you turn your idea into an impactful website that drives revenue for your brand. We have extensive experience building scalable, high-performance Drupal websites that take advantage of all the CMS has to offer. We can help you migrate your WordPress site seamlessly to Drupal or develop a revenue-generating digital experience from scratch.