Drupal vs. WordPress for Higher Education Websites
You’re about to begin a huge overhaul of your higher education website and one of the first steps is choosing a content management system. It’s likely that Drupal and WordPress have come up in your research, and you may be trying to decide between the two.
Drupal and WordPress are often compared to one another because they’re both open source content management systems. Both are capable of creating clean, responsive websites that are easy to manage for content editors. The functionality of both can be extended using third party code. And the code for both is openly available for anyone to use, change, and distribute, meaning there are no licensing fees like those required by closed source options.
There are a significant number of higher education websites on Drupal; Harvard, Brown, and Oxford University all use the CMS, to name a few. According to Drupal.org, 71% of the top 100 universities use Drupal. And there’s some sound reasoning behind that.
Both WordPress and Drupal have strengths and are well suited for a diverse range of projects. WordPress was primarily built for standalone websites or blogs with minimal variation in content types. Drupal was built for more complex, feature rich websites that require significant interconnectivity between pages or site sections, like those required by higher education.
Here are some factors to consider when choosing between the two content management systems.