In this post, we'll go over what features you look for in a CMS and why Drupal is one of the most powerful solutions available in 2022.
What is Drupal's purpose?
Drupal is an open-source CMS platform with over one million users worldwide that small-to-large companies may use without concern of vendor lock-in, inexpensive installation costs thanks to vast quantities of freely-available community code and a powerful and flexible architecture suited for the enterprise.
Drupal is a highly adaptable platform for digital innovation, scalability, and speed of deployment. Its open-source community is unlike any other, and it's a beautiful thing to be a part of — you can really do good in the world while building with Drupal by giving back to open-source software.
The present situation
The digital world is shifting, putting more pressure on online content management systems (CMSs) and businesses to keep up with evolving customer expectations. Users want more customised online experiences, more device connections, and more interactive aspects in their web experiences.
Organisations seek omnichannel content publishing (formerly known as COPE - Create Once, Publish Everywhere), quick and fluid user experiences, and a website that meets KPIs and corporate objectives.
Why Drupal? Because Drupal is a powerful tool that gets better with use
Drupal has established itself as the obvious leader in enterprise-level CMS platforms for bigger, more sophisticated projects.
As you can see in the photograph below, taken at DrupalCon Europe with Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, research suggests that, like excellent wine, a user's view of Drupal increases with time. It's a strong tool, but with great strength comes a compromise between intricacy and usefulness, at least for novices.
Drupal is a “proper” system
Businesses and marketers can easily integrate third-party products with Drupal, which sets it apart from the competition. Rather than forcing you to use proprietary automation tools and analytics, Drupal is built to be a flexible platform. It functions more like a web experience management system that enables you to integrate your favourite CRM software, for example, HubSpot or Salesforce, or inbound marketing platforms into your website.
This is why Drupal is an obvious solution for businesses looking to combine their favourite third-party technology with their website.
Enhanced user experience
Drupal 9 provides businesses with the tools they need to develop customer-focused experiences. From the minute your homepage loads, it should suit the requirements of your visitors, directing them toward that all-important buying decision.
In today's market, it means employing customised and customer-centric interactions that make each visit to your site seems like their experience has been tailored to match their particular requirements across different channels throughout their user journey, as Forrester points out.
Drupal is the greatest option among content management systems for these reasons: There are various built-in and donated modules that supercharge Drupal, making it the best choice among content management systems:
Personalisation
To offer your users the experience they want, you can use one of the content personalisation modules for Drupal, such as Personalization Module, Browsing History Recommender, Commerce Recommender, and Context-Menu Block.
Enhanced caching capabilities
Thanks to BigPipe and other cache optimisation modules, Drupal leads in terms of page loading efficiency and speed.
Options and flexibility
In Drupal, there are several ways to develop outstanding user experiences. Some instances need extreme flexibility, such as adjustable landing pages for specialised marketing campaigns, while others want more consistent management to ensure consistency in the appearance and feel of all types of material. The Paragraphs module is a common way to achieve a consistent-yet-flexible layout.
Useful for marketing
Drupal core now includes the Layout Builder module. It's a visual design and layout tool that makes creating adaptable landing pages and repurposing content across marketing campaigns a breeze. The Gutenberg module, which uses the same flexible editor like WordPress, is another popular choice.
Block system built-in
Drag and drop blocks to reorder the look of text and pictures on your website, and repeat the same block across numerous pages for design consistency and content reuse.
WYSIWYG editor
A popular feature that enables users to see how the text and photos they've placed into the text editor will appear before pressing the "publish" button.
Responsive design
Whether a visitor to your website is on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer, Drupal's responsive web design is scaled to match their displays right out of the box.
Social media modules
With one of Drupal's many social media connection modules, you can easily link online consumers to your Twitter and Facebook social media feeds from your website.
Multilingual
These functionalities are included in Drupal 8 core and allow you to translate your site or have the language shown on your site change based on the user's geographic location.
Editing on the fly
To save time while creating and uploading material to your website, type straight into a text editor in Drupal.
Enhancing your UX and UI is similar to cleaning a business to make it more appealing, pleasant, and efficient for consumers and employees to come. The advantage of building your storefront on a Drupal foundation is that you know you'll be operating on stable ground.
Drupal's APIs make it very extensible
If a contemporary CMS wants to improve and integrate with all stages of the customer experience, it has to have access to strong APIs. Several similar APIs were announced with the introduction of Drupal 8 and 9:
Render API improves the user experience by speeding up page rendering and implementing better caching methods.
The RESTful Online Services API in Drupal 8 allows you to create a decoupled Drupal site, communicate with native iOS/Android applications, and integrate with web services.
The JSON:API module enables JSON serialisation and communication
The Translation API in Drupal 8 allows you to change the language on your website based on where your visitors are located.
Added to this, Drupal’s API, querying, GraphQL, and microservices models make it easy to mould to almost any architecture with tools and features that improve the experience of both customers, admins, and developers.
Drupal works nicely with a variety of marketing tools
Organizations require a web CMS that keeps up with emerging sales and customer interaction technologies because they want dynamic information across numerous digital touchpoints (omnichannel). Drupal also shines in the field of e-commerce. To promote sales via improved customer interactions, Drupal has been smoothly integrated with the commerce systems of some of the world's biggest brands.
You can gather important consumer information using the Google Analytics module to improve how effectively your Drupal site communicates with and engages your target market.
Drupal is excellent for SEO
Semantic structure is important in the lives of content producers and managers. Auto-tagging technologies, such as Drupal's Metatag module, enable you to automatically add meta tags to your website, which is beneficial for SEO (SEO).
With APIs like Twitter Cards for Twitter and Facebook's Open Graph protocol, Drupal's Metatags module lets you influence how your material displays on social networking sites, allowing you to communicate consistent messages across platforms.
All of these features combine to make Drupal SEO one of the greatest and most customisable online CMS alternatives available.
A versatile and intuitive taxonomy system is another important feature for contemporary, SEO-friendly websites. Drupal's built-in taxonomy system is intended to make it easier to arrange your content using keywords. This user-friendly content categorisation system has clear advantages: it makes it simpler to arrange material on your website, including by topic, as well as browse to search keywords and select viewing choices.
Drupal's flexible taxonomy system is built to accommodate your organisation's expansion, so you can keep adding content and features to your website without bursting the seams of your CMS.
Why Drupal? What about WordPress?
Drupal is often compared to WordPress. Both enable you to swiftly adapt and innovate upon a strong pre-existing framework, open-source code, and modules, while also providing you with free access to a plethora of tools and knowledge to assist you in achieving the desired features, functionality, and design.
The platforms, though, are still extremely distinct. For more information about how Drupal varies from WordPress and what situations it is best suited for, see our page here.
Drupal versus WordPress - latest versions
Drupal 9 is the most recent version, and it is always evolving to be a leading platform in terms of interaction, personalisation, and scalability. For businesses wishing to connect CRMs like Salesforce and Hubspot, eCommerce, marketing and SEO, and automation, it offers a constantly developing ecosystem.