5 Reasons why Drupal remains a top choice as a CMS

What is one thing that Pinterest, Harvard University, NASA, and the Government of India have in common? All their websites are powered by Drupal, a popular open-source content management system (CMS) built to handle heavy usage. Drupal has the rare distinction of being equally popular with developers and marketers. Its popularity stems from its infinitely customizable and sufficiently intuitive structure that allows effective content management.

Despite the popularity of WordPress, Drupal continues to exist in a league of its own, thanks to its emphasis on scalability and customization. With over 32,000 active modules, Drupal is one of the most effective CMS tools out there. It also helps that Drupal ships with a multisite installation, i.e., it’s possible to create separate, independent sites that function from a single codebase.

22 years after its release, here are 5 reasons why Drupal could help your business build and maintain a delightful and dynamic online experience.
 

Flexibility and Scalability

As is expected of a state-of-the-art CMS, Drupal ships with a robust framework that can accommodate highly complex web applications relying solely on its core modules and APIs. This includes popular features such as RSS feed generation, pagelistings, commenting, user permissions etc. Drupal’s layout builder module is perhaps one of the most notable examples of it’s commitment to providing great flexibility to its users.

However, if you find Drupal’s basic functions wanting, you could always turn to the community-contributed modules that have been written over the past two decades. All of the modules are expertly crafted pieces of code that can be neatly integrated to your existing setup in a matter of minutes. From Google Analytics to GDPR cookie compliance, there’s a module for just about anything.

Drupal was built with enterprises in mind and is wel equipped to handle heavy traffic and sudden spikes in website traffic. When optimised well, it can scale well to millions of users and Drupal has extensive documentation to help with managing site performance and scalability.
 

Extensive Personalization

Drupal’s core tenets of flexibility contribute to its position as a CMS that can be personalized extensively to suit the needs of the enterprise adopting it. With both implicit and explicit personalization, Drupal allows websites to deliver specific material that is relevant to key audiences in certain geographies. The two core modules that operate here are the geolocation module and the taxonomy module, both of which combine to deliver nuanced targeting capabilities.

There are over 600 location-related modules and over 800 taxonomy-related modules. Popular examples include Geocoder and geoPHP (for location), Menu breadcrumb, and Taxonomy views integration under taxonomy.

To keep up with the latest advances in web development, Drupal also ships with several APIs that enable it to work seamlessly with modern stacks. It comes with all the popular ones: RESTful web services API, JSON API, render API, and translation API.
 

Most Secure CMS

One of Drupal’s biggest strengths relative to its counterparts is its robust security. In fact, it’s so renowned for its security that it's used by several high-performing entities, including but aren’t limited to NASA, Tesla, the Indian government, the Australian government, etc. Drupal’s open-source stature allows its codebase to be audited by a wide range of people, whose collective intelligence translates to one of the most rigorous auditing and evaluation practices

Drupal has a host of modules that were specifically written for enhancing security and regularly published security advisories to keep the community informed of it’s performance. For instance, the database encryption feature doesn’t alter user experience while protecting sensitive data in case of a hacking attempt. It is perhaps no wonder that Drupal is unanimously acclaimed for being one of the most secure CMS options, if not the most secure. The CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA and security kit modules are the most installed security modules.
 

Committed Userbase

If you are having second thoughts on Drupal after looking at its relatively puny market share, fret not. Drupal has over 1 million users worldwide and the Drupal community is one of the most active and vibrant CMS communities in existence. Most queries are resolved in the forum and the community has labored to write extensive documentation to provide new adopters with everything they need to use Drupal effectively.

Furthermore, as a Drupal user, you are likely to be sharing CMS options with the likes of Harvard, Oxford, NASA, Tesla and other marquee clients. What better assurance does one need?
 

Native Multilingual Support

With over a 100 languages that are immediately available, Drupal is the undisputed king when it comes to multilingual support. Envisioned as a truly global CMS, Drupal also has a dedicated internationalization module that can be used to expand on its core multilingual capabilities. This kind of multilingual support may seem like overkill for most young companies, but it is extremely useful if you intend on operating across multiple-geographies and wish to maintain your website in different languages. In fact, this is probably why Drupal is an eternal favorite among multinational companies.

Multilingual sites do wonders for organic search and non-english speakers (which constitutes most of the world) are likely to choose you over other counterparts owing to your decision to run your site in their native language.
 

Free, Open-Source, Versatile

The fact that Drupal is completely free to use and operates as open-source software means just makes it that much more attractive to use. Drupal is built to fully take advantage of network effects and the greater the number of adopters, the better the overall experience. For a potential user, this also translates to a slew of other advantages. Thanks to it extensive user base, Drupal is reliable, cost-efficient, and more importantly, comes with no vendor lock-in.

That’s not all. Drupal is an SEO-friendly CMS that offers a whole host of features and modules to assist you in your SEO goals. Thanks to it’s extensive list of community contributed modules, Drupal can work with almost any MarTech stack. Hubspot, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, Marketo, Adobe Marketing Cloud etc.
 

Thinking of switching to Drupal?

Not only is Drupal one of the oldest CMS options in existence, but it is also one of the most feature-packed, secure, and robust CMS options among the popular choices. As a young company looking to expand its market share, choosing Drupal will set you up for future success as it can handle scale and multi-site support much better than its competitors. 

If your company is on the cusp of immense growth, Drupal is the best option to ensure that your web hosting can accommodate large traffic volumes. At Kellton, we have over a decade’s worth of experience in helping companies with custom Drupal installations. Click here to schedule a call with our team to learn more.