Outgrowing Wordpress?
Signs that it's time to look onward
If you're reading this, you're either just interested or rather concerned. And so you should be! As a CXO or key decision maker, it's your responsibility to notice and act when your CMS is holding your business back.
This article is not just a dig at WordPress; we're all mature enough to know that a CMS that powers half the internet has hit some strides. But it is designed to prompt some key questions and point out technological boundaries that you might be hitting as a business. And if it helps make some minor clarification for you, then we'll call that a success whether you end up considering Drupal or not.
Take a moment to consider (alone or with your team) these questions about your business website:
CMS limitations
- Does your site do what you currently need from it?
- Is the site supporting your business growth?
- Can the site keep up with what your editorial team need?
- Does your site share data with all the analytics platforms that you want to use?
Customer engagement
- Do you know what you're missing out on from other CMS platforms?
- Are your current and prospective customers engaging well with your site?
- Is the look and feel getting out of date?
Growth limitations
- Can the site extend to fulfil your ambitions?
- Are there struggles to keep the site up to date and secure? (it IS up to date and secure, right?)
- Do you have too many plugins and subscriptions to manage?
Common limitations with WordPress
WordPress is an effective and highly flexible CMS that has achieved great things - but that doesn't mean it's always the solution for your business case. Look out for some of these scenarios and consider whether something needs to change.
Plugin chaos
The marketplace for plugins has been a powerhouse for both creativity and success, but it has also brought about some serious pain points.
- Developers can stop supporting their plugins (as anyone is entitled to do - especially if they're not being paid!), leaving users with unresolved bugs and quirks.
- Plugins can become insecure through discovered security vulnerabilities. Maintainers can be slow to resolve the issues, and unmaintained plugins are at risk of never receiving a fix.
- Sites can become reliant on a large number of plugins, becoming fragile and unreliable.
- Maintaining paid subscriptions to lots of plugins can get complicated and hard to manage consistently.
Translation & multilingual support
Going international has always been hard, but some web platforms definitely support it better than others. For WordPress there are plugins that try, but for Drupal it's always been in the DNA thanks to its roots with trilingual developers in The Netherlands. If you're finding it hard to manage translations, it might be time to move to a platform with deep, fully mature language support.
Extensibility
WordPress' field system has made a lot happen, but it has intrinsic limits due to the scope of its design; it was originally designed and built for blogs, after all. Newer platforms are essentially architected as custom application builders, allowing full free reign to build and create and extend.
It doesn't take much to hit these barriers, and although plugins have made a lot happen, they'll never be able to achieve the same as developers could on other platforms designed for deep extension and customisation.
For site owners struggling with these limitations, moving up to Drupal is a natural step.
Should I upgrade to Drupal?
There's a lot to look forward to! Since you're hitting well-known limitations, Drupal is the ideal platform to step up to.
But if you're not sure, you can check out our high-level CMS comparison, or our Knowledge Centre which covers key feature areas in more depth:
Editorial and administrative experience
Drupal's admin UI has seen huge improvements in the last few years, and continues to evolve to serve editors and admins the powerful interfaces they need, and rapidly.
The well-structured admin menus, fine-grained permissions and fully-customisable data structures mean that users generally have access to exactly what they need, and no more - which gives a fast, clean and uncluttered experience that helps the team get things done.
Flexible content and data
As a custom application building platform, Drupal allows for flexing and customising your data types exactly as needed. You're not stuck with just Posts - you can create anything you want!
Drupal's powerful architecture will sort out the database schemas and get you rolling in seconds. Similarly, you can also customise the Forms that you use to view and edit your content.
Powerful media handling
The built-in Media Library stores all your images, videos, YouTube and Vimeo links and private documents ready for easy access across the site. You don’t need an external DAM, though you can plug one in relatively easily.
Media also supports adding fields to your images, videos and files. This makes management much easier (think tagging on steroids) and also gives more power to the entities using them and the templates displaying them.
Time to unlock your business potential?
Next steps
Ultimately, your website is a business tool and it has to serve your growth goals.
Drupal is generally a natural step up for businesses hitting WordPress' limitations, and we've covered some of the key wins you could achieve.
From here, it's worth getting in touch to chat through your situation and what an upgrade might look like.
Or see our Knowledge Centre to dig through more of Drupal's powerful features.