Drupal

Editor's note, 2026. Written in May 2017. The three products compared here are all still actively developed, and the distinction the article draws (that Drupal behaves like a framework wearing a CMS interface) has held up. The version-specific details have not: Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025 and Drupal 11 is the current major release. See "How to choose in 2026" at the end.

When it's time to select the best content management system for your needs, you have three main choices: Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. These competing products all have their own unique attributes that make it difficult to decide which one to choose. In this post, we will go over the details of each CMS and make a recommendation for you in the end. Even if you don't agree with our recommendation, you can read on to learn the most important characteristics of the big three CMS options and make an informed decision based on your needs.

Wordpress

Wordpress is the biggest player in the free CMS arena. It's been around for a while and it has a lot of appealing features. First of all, it is very accessible. In many ways, it is the default option for many major hosts like Bluehost. When you buy hosting from them, it's trivial to install and set up a Wordpress site in just a couple of minutes because a large part of the process is automated. That means it takes almost no effort to get started with Wordpress for most hosting solutions.

Plugins

The biggest draw for Wordpress, though, is the plugins. The size of Wordpress and its vast popularity means that there is a large and active developer community centered around extending its functionality and creating new features. The possibilities for what Wordpress is capable of expanding continually because if a feature is attractive enough, someone will develop a plugin that accomplishes it.

Some Wordpress plugins are free and others cost money. Often, the paid plugins have free demos or trial versions that you can test out. The vast array of plugins means you don't need to reinvent the wheel; most key features are either bundled into the core product or exist in one or more plugins.

But one caveat is that even though there are some free plugins that are great. Other super great ones are not free. Or if they are not paid, it is less optimized for your website performance.

Community

The community is also generally supportive and helpful for new users. If you are concerned that you lack experience making your own site, then there are many people that can answer your questions, give you tips, suggest tutorials, and otherwise help out.

Having a welcoming community is a crucial aid because there is a lot that goes into creating your own site that you won't know without doing it firsthand. You need some help to get through unexpected hurdles and to point you in the direction of useful resources.

Design Style

Aside from the plugins, Wordpress tends to not be very customizable. Many visual elements are either completely or mostly fixed. On the one hand, this ensures that you can't make a big mistake that will ruin the design or make the site hard to use. On the other, this tends to generate a certain same-ness across Wordpress sites that can be limiting.

Large User Base

Wordpress is probably the first CMS that anyone thinks about, and that's for good reason. The plugins are the most important defining characteristic, and they create a snowball effect. The more good plugins there are, the more people will want to use the product. The more Wordpress users there are, the more people can brainstorm and develop new plugins.

Add in how easy it is to install and use and Wordpress is an extremely powerful and extendible CMS that is the best option for beginners and a strong competitor for everyone else. If you have a certain idea for a site, especially if it is a blog or is otherwise designed to mostly host your own content, then it's a good idea to check and see if there is a Wordpress setup that can get it done before looking at anything else.

Drupal

The key takeaway for Drupal is that the user has more power, but also more responsibility. That means that the CMS can do more and deliver more customization than base Wordpress, but doing those things requires real web developer skills and coding experience. With Drupal, you can reach under the hood of the site more and mess around with the underlying code to get things exactly how you want, but without the right knowledge, you won't be able to get much done.

Plugins

Drupal is less popular than Wordpress because of that skill barrier, but it does have a lot of plugins (modules) to offer. There are generally not as many as Wordpress offers, but the selection is still quite large. And all free modules are enough to build the sites. These play the same roles as they do for Wordpress, extending the functionality and providing new or easier tools. Unlike with Wordpress, you get more control over the plugins and how they work because of your greater access to the code of your site.

Skill Barrier

The more experience with coding you have before you start using Drupal, the better. It is possible to come to Drupal as an almost complete novice and still succeed, but it is going to take a very long time to troubleshoot your own site and overcome the obstacles that any site hits.

This is not necessarily a disadvantage of Drupal, because it does afford you more control in terms of both breadth and depth. But the less experienced you are, the more time these things will take. It can be a barrier to Drupal by inexperienced users. If you are running a small business, then you could be spending that time on other tasks instead. 
More so than for Wordpress, you may need to hire someone to maintain and manage your site instead of doing it all yourself or with talent already on staff. That's an extra expense, and you'll need to carefully weigh whether it is worth the investment.

But this is to assume that your website is not a complex or highly complicated level, and you will not need to extend greatly later. The cost and time for these complex tasks in Wordpress most of time are greater than Drupal. You may have known that Drupal is known for its extendability, feasibility to customize. These make Drupal still an indispensable candidate in the CMS market.  

Small Community

Drupal's small, but dedicated community isn't as immediately accessible as Wordpress's is just because of its size. You'll have to get more done on your own. Again, the more experienced and self-sufficient you are with the languages of web development, the less of an obstacle this is. It's best to use Drupal for more advanced sites with deeper functionality over which you want to control, rather than just looking up the best plugin and dropping it into your design. This is the past, and as Drupal developers for years, we see Drupal 8 has been more aimed at normal users. And there is a vote of us for Drupal whether small or complex sites. There's nothing that Wordpress can do that Drupal cannot, even it helps you build the hardest kind of website.

Joomla

Joomla occupies a bit of a strange place. It is a slightly popular than Drupal - a ratio of 10-8, but not as much as Wordpress. It offers more control than Wordpress, but not as much as Drupal. It's an in-between option that has a few tricks all its own. For example, Joomla offers some useful templates and packages to help you quickly create online store pages, social networks, and a few other predefined site roles. These would take a lot of tweaking to set up with either Drupal or Wordpress.

Small Plugin Library

Unlike Drupal and Wordpress, Joomla doesn't use a lot of plugins and there isn't nearly the same development culture surrounding the CMS. There is a good selection of themes that can change the look of your site, and if you want to get more involved you can go deeper for greater control, but that selection of free resources just isn't there. If you become used to the convenience of plugins, it can be hard to go to Joomla.

Networks and Stores

Where Joomla shines is in its ability to quickly set up social networks and stores. These more complex constructions take more work under Wordpress and Drupal because those products are both a few years older than Joomla and weren't originally built with those ideas in mind. Now it is possible to create a store or a network in any of the three CMSs, but Joomla has the best native support.

Easy Accessibility

If you want to use Joomla, then you should not need to hire a developer or a webmaster the same way you might if you were using Drupal. It is easy enough to use and there is better support than you get with Drupal. Wordpress is still better because of its community, but Joomla isn't far behind.

Joomla has a reputation for being the most flexible CMS. It lends itself well to just about any site role and none of them take much work to put together. That makes them appealing to anyone who might be using several sites in different roles or wants the ability to incorporate a variety of roles into one site.

The Winner

Normal Users with Little knowledge of development

After reviewing all the evidence, looking from the perspective of a normal user with little knowledge of development, Wordpress is the optimal way to go. It is popular, has such a vast library of plugins, along with with a strong community.

But this is not to mention the downsides. Awesome plugins are not free. There are free plugins for some great functions, but in many of them, the plugin code is not optimized for your site. You have to pay to get the best ones.

Building a normal site with a few functions with Wordpress is okay. But when it comes to large to super complex sites, it’s really hard to go with Wordpress. Most of the cases, the time and budget spent on these kinds of projects worked on Wordpress are significantly higher than Drupal.

Control

If you are a highly experienced user who wants to get into the nitty gritty of design, then Drupal might be worth a look. The main concern is that if you want help or technical support, it is a lot farther away than with Wordpress. There are plenty of people who swear by Drupal because they want to feel in control of each and every element and how it functions down to the code. If that's you, then Drupal can give you everything you need along with its own impressive array of plugins.

The Power of Plugins

Joomla's in-between status tends to leave it without a clearly defined role. Take a look at it and see if the design or interface appeals to you. It's meant to be an intermediate jack of all trades CMS. While its base version can handle some things better than base Wordpress or Drupal, it doesn't have the same plugin culture. That means in terms of functionality the other two CMSs can always catch up and surpass Joomla in any given area just by developing some plugins to mimic or improve on what Joomla can do.

Bottom Line

From a business perspective, Drupal has an additional cost in that you will need someone on staff with coding chops to run the site, but all three of these CMSs are free to use. Plugins can vary greatly in price, so do some research whenever you want to add functionality to find the right balance of quality and cost.

 

How to choose in 2026

All three products are still actively developed and all three can build a competent website. Choosing between them is easier if you stop comparing feature lists and answer three questions about your own project instead.

Is this a site, or is it a system?

If what you need is pages, a blog, a contact form and a shop, almost anything will do the job, and the deciding factor is who will maintain it. If what you need has roles, states, approvals, audit trails and integrations, you are building an application, and the product's data model matters more than its editing experience. That is the distinction this article drew in 2017 and it is the one that still decides projects.

Who will operate it in three years?

A product that matches the skills available to you is worth more than a product that scores better on paper. This is a hiring question disguised as a technology question, and it is routinely answered last.

What happens at the next major version?

Every product here has major version transitions, and the cost of one is proportional to how much contributed or custom code you have accumulated. Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025; organisations that had stayed close to core moved in weeks, and organisations carrying a large contributed module estate are still moving. The lesson generalises to all three products.

If the answer to the first question is "a system", that is the work we do: Drupal development for content-heavy products, and web applications where the requirement is workflow rather than publishing.

Where to go from here

• Drupal development: what we build and how.
• Pricing: real bands, published, with the milestone structure.
• You own the code: the question to ask whichever product you pick.

As a new user, you might have been in a place where you are struck with the common fear that how you should start with Drupal and that what resources you should find.

It’s easy to be overflowed among a sea of information if there’re no guidance. Of course you don’t need a perfect road map to start. But knowing the direction helps you make a more rapid acceleration on the learning path.

What You Need?

A dedication to learn

Make a commitment to learn Drupal. Just one or two hours a day will get you ahead long in the future. You won’t be skilled if Drupal seems to be a CMS to play around in your leisure time. If you are really interested Drupal , and want to work as a developer, or as a Drupal site builder, making a commitment to work and educate yourself on a daily basis is never underrated.

Prior coding skills?

You don’t need to know html/css, php, etc to start with Drupal. Of course, if you do, you’ll get further than a new user without technical skills. For Drupal developers, it is necessary. But for a normal user using Drupal as a CMS, you don’t need to.

Getting started

Well begun is half done

Aristole

I don't think you need to have a great beginning, just start. I've recalled how many times I tried to learned new things, but postponed. Make an incentive, whether buying a video subscription, getting a book, call a Drupal developer friend to help you immediately. If you are willing to learn Drupal, push it. Give yourself a firm reason to start.

Drupal Resources

"You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain"

Miyamoto Musashi - The invincible Japanese samurai in the 16th century

In fact, there are a lot of resources for you to begin with Drupal. I don't say what is more important than others. You can learn by reading books, and work on your sites. You can start by watching some video tutorials. You can begin by crawling on Drupal.org. They are all fine. Whatever resources you follow, the end in mind is to become efficient with Drupal. You can learn with only one resource at the beginning. But I'll recommend you to combine all of them together to get the best of your Drupal learning. But don't get overwhelmed. I'll list all the resources here.

Drupal.org

This is the first and foremost resource that comes to my mind. There exists a variety of materials: themes, distribution, modules, forums support... . It is no doubt the largest resource about Drupal. And there is a great community here with discussion, group, support.
This place also holds lots of Drupal beginner guides. Some tutorials for starters. Here and here

The problem is that there are so many materials, one can be perplexed as a first time Drupal user. This is the best place to download all Drupal installations, modules, themes,..., but when it comes to learning, you have to try to distinct among so much noise. You must try to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Books

I don't recommend you to read some books right away when starting because it takes more time than other resources. If you want, They're still a great resource. For beginners, starting with these books will get you a clear and detailed look about Drupal. Reading books will give you an overall and in-depth view of Drupal. Something that videos, and online tutorials will not compare. Because the authors sat down, and tried to sum up the best of his knowledge and experience to get into a book.

Recommendation for beginners

• Using Drupal
  This is a good introduction to the Drupal 7 CMS. This book assumes that you have no knowledge with Drupal, and get you to know the basics. It’ll help you to understand the CMS, how to set up common functionality, etc.

• Drupal for Dummies
  You may shudder hearing this book. But it does give beginners a very rudimentary look about the CMS in a fast and funny way. You’ll learn about this CMS, its features, how to create, manage content, install modules, activate themes,...

• Drupal 8 for Absolute Beginners
  If you want to get your hand on Drupal 8 immediately, this book will give you enough basic knowledge to work with the latest Drupal version.

Books for Drupal developers

• Pro Drupal 7 Development
  If you want the only ONE book for developers, I would recommend this one. This book covers detailed knowledge of Drupal core, how Drupal works, how to build a module, how to create theme, the api and much more. If you want to dig deep into Drupal development, Pro Drupal 7 development is a great reference.

• Drupal 7 Module Development
  If you have got some familiarity with Drupal site-building, and want to take your power to the next level, this is a good one. The book breaks down in details the factors related to creating modules and others (database interfaces, theming, administration) and how they all work together.

• Drupal 7 Themes
  As a name said, it is a good introduction for someone who really want to start with Drupal theming. By the book, you’ll learn how to make Drupal look prettier. You’ll get knowledge about the Drupal 7 theming Architecture, how to set up a theme, create new themes, modify existing ones, etc.

If you want more, you can find other Drupal books via here

Videos

Many people prefer videos because it’s very fast to learn something. Drupal is hard to grasp if you don’t see it first hand. That’s when videos make an advantage. It’s easier to learn if you can simultaneously see and hear an experienced Drupal developer trying to guide you with a Drupal topic. Let's dig into the video places.

• Udemy One of the most popular online training programs on the Internet. I have got some good feedbacks from some of my Drupal developers friends who subscribed here. You can learn the Drupal 7 course, or the latest Drupal 8 version here

• Drupalize.me They say that there are presently 1188 videos onsite with 321 hours of training. It is one of the largest videos resources via subscription to learn about Drupal.

• BuildaModule.com Another great place to learn Drupal via subscription. It gives you a step by step video tutorial to start with Drupal.

• Youtube Youtube is free, but you need to spend a fair amount of time searching for what you need. There’re so many Drupal tutorials here.
  If you want to have some basic tutorial about Drupal on Youtube, I recommend you watch the first 4 parts of this series here.

  Let's ignore the video titles. Although it’s for building an ecommerce sites, the first 4 parts do a good job of giving you basic guide to installation of Drupal. And the rest 6 parts is for building an ecommerce site with Ubercart.

Google

Say you're struck into a Drupal issue. The fastest way to get it solved is to type the keyword in the search engines. You’ll find almost what you need through the results on Drupal.org communities, Blogs, Youtube,... Learning has been made much easier in Google era.

Group Meetings

Why not mingle in the seminar, and conferences for Drupal users & developers in your place? Asking for advices, exchanging ideas, listening to talks from senior developers are a great boost to your learning with Drupal.

What do you learn Drupal for?

To make the most of your learning path, you have to know what your purpose for pursuing Drupal is. And to the best of my knowledge, there are 4 flavors of orientation that Drupal users have followed:

• To become a Drupal developer
• To be a Drupal themer/ To make Drupal look prettier
• To use Drupal as a site builder/webmaster
• To use it as a quicksilver Drupal user

Developers

They are the ones who have a deep knowledge about this CMS. They will do any customization to fit their needs. They can overwrite any theme. They are those who can customize the modules to their purpose. And if there are no useful modules that they need, they can write their own ones.

The path to Drupal developers require you to learn Drupal well. Find good resources mentioned above. Watch tutorial, read Pro Drupal Development. Learn about the Form API.

Themers

Themers get your Drupal site to look prettier. Besides knowledge about the CMS. They have to have an efficient level of html/css, js to work with. You can learn basic theming. Read Drupal 7 Themes or Drupal 8 theming

Find some good frameworks to begin theming. There are Bootstrap, Zen theme, Omega theme. Among them, we favor Bootstrap. Most themes on our sites are built with Bootstrap. It is a modern framework to Drupal theming
And you can get some free themes on Drupal.org, or purchase some premium themes to know what’s inside the themes you like.

Site Builders

Site builders have a great knowledge of their Drupal site. They are the webmasters of their own website, or their clients. They will do anything to get the site they want, getting some functionalities by installing modules, changing the content, customizing the website forms. They alter the website appearance, cssing it if their sites don’t look nice. They build websites for themselves, for customers.

If you follow this path, you need to learn to set up the website on your own. Learn to get what Drupal can and cannot do. Try to work with some projects. Build the content, install and test modules,... You need to build, break, and rebuild many websites to become a good Drupal site builder.

Quicksilver users

By quicksilver users, I mean the ones who are curious about Drupal. They just want to learn what Drupal is, and try playing around with it. They may not have any coding skills. They are the ones who use website for their business, or for fun. If there are some functions of their website that they want, they will try to learn to implement. If they cannot, they may ask a Drupal developer to do it for them.

If you’re the ones, get to know some basic knowledge about Drupal will help you use Drupal well.

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That’s it. It’s my experience and some suggestions for someone who really wants to start with Drupal. If you have something that you think will help people with their Drupal learning, let me know and leave a comment below.

Editor's note, 2026. This list was written in November 2014, for Drupal 7, which reached end of life in January 2025. Some of the modules below have merged into others, one of the services has been discontinued entirely, and the rest need their release pages checked before you plan around them. The SEO work itself has not changed much: clean URLs, correct metadata, redirects that are actually in place, a sitemap that reflects the site. Read "What changed since 2014" below.

Whether you’re a SEO practitioner, a webmaster, or a Drupal developer who works on a daily basis, having a web technology that enhances search engine optimization (SEO) is never underrated. In fact, choosing a CMS that assists to elevate your site to the top results of search engine results page (SERP) should be planned before setting your foot on building your websites.

Why?

Because once you get the whole website completed, and then realize that you need to replace the CMS, it would consume you tons of efforts and cost. That would be very painful.

If you have just started with Drupal, and intend to learn website optimization, or even if you’re a loyal Drupal user but never taking any steps with SEO, we have a good news for you. Drupal is considered one of the top SEO friendly CMSes. Besides the advantage of Drupal core & architect, we attribute this to Drupal’s various choices of useful SEO modules. Keep these modules in mind when you need to boost your websites in search engines.

1. Pathauto

One of the most downloaded modules of Drupal. The Pathauto module saves your time from manually creating the path/URL aliases. It does this by automatically generating URL/path aliases for the contents (nodes, taxonomy, terms, users) based on configurable patterns.
Let’s say we configure our blog entry as blog-entry/[node:title]. And we publish this blog post with the title “Top Drupal SEO Modules”, Pathauto will immediately manufacture a seo friendly URL as “blog/top-drupal-seo-modules” instead of “node/121”.

2. Page Title

Title is undeniably among the most important factor of your seo plan. The Drupal default title is rendered by the node. Page Title allows you to take control of the node, and creates whatever title name you want. By setting patterns for the title, you can create unique and relevant title for the content. You can also set different patterns if you choose page title as automatically being generated.

3. Metatag

Drupal doesn’t support editable meta tags fields. That’s when meta tags module comes in handy.
This module enables your control over the meta tags, including page title, description, and keywords. You are able to set meta tags for users, nodes, taxonomy terms, and views,…
Meta tags also gives users options to set default meta tags for the entire site - whole or individual pages.

4. Search 404

The search 404 module gives you a way to handle with 404 page errors on your website. Upon installing the modules, when a user enters a URL that renders a 404 page, the result be will automatically navigated to the internal site search with the related term in the URL. Why is this useful?
404 page can be a negative sign to the visitors. When they see there are no results on the page, they can escape your site. This thereby increases the bounce rate, which is a criteria search engines uses to rate your website's quality. Search 404 module helps get over this issue.

5. Redirect

What if you want to redirect an existing URL to another one? Redirect helps you with the task. In addition, it keeps the two links on your website without rendering a 404 not found error. This is a great module if you want to deal with duplicate content.

6. Global Redirect

While the alias system in Drupal helps generate clean SEO-friendly URLs, there’s a problem rising. The default URL is still there, meaning there are 2 URLs with the same content on your site. The search engine bot can specify this duplicate content, and this may be a big issue. Global Redirect handles this problem by checking to see if there is an alias for the existing URL and redirect to the alias URL.
The module also comes with other important features: removing the trailing slash in the URL; verifying that clean URLs are being implemented correctly; checking permission and access to nodes, URLs.

7. Content Optimizer

Content Optimizer brings a quick analysis and statistics of your website content and gives you a specific idea about how SEO friendly your site is. And it provides recommended actions to improve search engine rankings. The Content Analysis module is required for installation.

8. SEO Checklist

The SEO checklist modules lists the most important SEO tasks and the relevant modules needed installing to improve onsite SEO. The module doesn’t take any action with your site. It only informs a comprehensive SEO tasks you need to do. Once a task is completed, you’ll see a mark off. For someone who has known SEO basics, this is valuable because you don’t have to go through everything to check your on-site SEO issues.

9. Drupal SEO Tools

This is an “all in one” SEO suite. Drupal SEO Tools provides a dashboard which covers a number of SEO functions for the sites including: keywords, titles, tags, paths, redirects, sitemaps, Google analytics, webmaster tool, etc.
It has some prerequisites that must be installed before use. It also gives a number of recommended modules to make full use of the suite. This module is hugely useful if you intend to work with multiple seo tools in one place.

10. Menu Attributes

The Menu attributes module allows the administrator to pinpoint specific attributes, consisting id, name, class, styles, and rel.
In terms of SEO, menu attributes lets you apply custom attributes rel =”nofollow”. This should not be missed in your seo strategy because nofollow devalues unimportant internal and external links so that you can pass more link juices on links that matter.

11. Menu Breadcrumb

As the name has said, this module adds a breadcrumb menu line on the top of your website. Breadcrumb has two tangible benefit for both users and search engines. First, it lets the user know where he is in the navigation hierarchy. Finally, there’s an anchor text in the breadcrumb, which gives an internal link to the relevant URL.

12. Links Checker

Broken links are precisely a negative signal to search engines. You’ll need a module like Links Checker to occasionally specify failed results which you need to make a fix to.

13. SEO Compliance Checker

The SEO Compliance Checker executes a full check upon your creation and modification of a node. This module is immensely helpful for SEO beginners & webmasters as it visually display a result which lets them know what needs improving to bring in a strong well optimized content.
This encompasses scanning if there are sufficient alt tags in the image, usage of keywords in the node titles, keyword density on the body,… You can make a preset of user-defined rule to base the module result of choices shown.

14. Xml sitemap

Your website definitely needs a Xml site map – a directory of your website. It makes it easy for Google’s search bot to crawl and index the website. Xml sitemap automatically generates an up to date sitemap that conforms to sitemaps.org specifications.

15. Site Verification

In order to make sure that search engines are properly crawling and indexing your site, you have to verify it. This module makes the verifying process easier and it supports a number of search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing,… The module enables verifying by uploading a html file or adding meta tags.
Use this with xml sitemap allows your website content to be appropriately indexed and up to date in the search engines’ eyes.

16. Html Purifier

Search engine reads your website content via raw html. So it’s always important to make sure have a clean easy-to-read code. Html filter will check your website code to conform to standard html rule. It also helps removes malicious code along the way.

17. Tag Clouds

As the name implies, this module creates tag clouds - lists of tags, based on the taxonomies of your site. There are other modules with the similar function, but we find this is the widely used, simple, and easy to work with.

18. Taxonomy Title

With Taxonomy Title, you can edit the heading tag (H1) of the taxonomy page. The importance of H1 tag should never be neglected for on page SEO. And we have a whole module dedicated to change the H1 tag of the taxonomy.

19. Google Analytics

This tool by Google is by far the best free analytic software you should integrate with your website. Although it is possible to manually insert the Google Analytics into your site, the module makes the task easier. Besides it offers a variety of features: track/exclude certain users, roles & pages; modify what kinds of links are tracked; Drupal message tracking,…

20. Mollom

Spam has always been an issue that we need to deal with when working with contents. It causes your website to look bad in the eyes of the visitors and the search engines. Sometimes spam with links extracts the page juice of your website. That’s why we need Mollom.
The module using a free version of Mollon service helps us detect and prevent spam based on the posted content, the reputation and activity history of the users. It operates by blocking the poster immediately or forcing entering the Captcha to be accepted.

21. Schedule

What if you want set specific time for your node to be published? Since Drupal core doesn’t support the function, Schedule module can't be missed.
Not only does It let posts be published on a given date, it also allows it to be unpublished later. It is extremely handy if you work with multiple contents. You can set time span for the blog posts, or choose the time that when there are the most visitors on your site for the content release. Definitely valuable for content marketing & SEO.

What changed since 2014?

Module in this list	Where it stands now
Global Redirect	Merged into the Redirect module. Install Redirect; you get both.
Page Title	Superseded by Metatag, which handles the title tag along with the rest of the metadata.
Mollom	Discontinued by Acquia in 2018. The service no longer exists.
XML Sitemap	Still a contributed module. Simple XML Sitemap is the other common choice on modern Drupal; both are actively used.
Pathauto, Metatag, Redirect, Search 404, Link Checker, Scheduler, Menu Attributes, Menu Breadcrumb, Tagclouds, Taxonomy Title, HTML Purifier, Site Verify, Google Analytics, SEO Checklist, SEO Tools, SEO Checker, Content Optimizer	Check each project page on drupal.org for a current release. Several of these were written for a version of Drupal that no longer exists, and a module page tells you the truth faster than any list can.

What has not changed about Drupal SEO

The module list dates. The work does not.

• One URL per thing. Clean, stable paths, and a redirect in place the moment a path changes. Most of the technical SEO damage we see on inherited sites is old URLs that were never redirected.
• Metadata that is written, not generated. A title tag and description per page that describe that page. A pattern applied across two hundred nodes produces two hundred pages that look the same to a crawler.
• A sitemap that reflects reality. Including the modification dates. A sitemap where everything was modified on the same second tells a crawler nothing.
• Headings that describe sections. A page that jumps from H1 to H3 is harder to quote, which matters more now that answers are assembled from passages rather than pages.
• Speed, and specifically the largest element above the fold. No module fixes an unoptimised hero image.

Where to go from here

• Drupal development: builds where the URL structure, metadata and sitemap are part of the work rather than a later pass.
• Support and maintenance: including on sites we did not build, which is where most SEO debt is found.
• Pricing: the published bands.

What is the name?

Many of you could have been like me. I’m been a Drupal user for a long time, but not only recently did I do a research to find out what the story behind it was.

Drupal has its name from the Dutch language but it was founded in Belgium. It was originally written by Dries Buytaert as a message board so that Dries and his group of friends could stay in touch, shared interesting findings, and talked about their personal lives.

At first, Dries wanted to name it Dorp.org (meaning village in Dutch). But he made a typo when checking the domain name, which turned into Drop. He decided to use the mistyped word because he thought it sounded much better.

Though developed in the early day as an internal board for Dries’ group, Drop.org’s audiences grew rapidly. People shared, discussed about ideas, web technologies. It was such a great experience. And there’s a proposal to release the web technologies, the software that ran the site. In this way, people could have wider chance to develop, to do more experimentations, and make greater contribution to the community.

So in January 2001, Dries made a decision to launch the software behind drop.org and named it Drupal

The “Drupal” term embodies “druppel” in Dutch, meaning "drop" (as in "a water droplet"). Hence, you can see the drop image on its logo.

So What is Drupal?

In its fundamentality, Drupal is an open source content management system. Some people would raise a question about what “open source”, and “content management system” are. We’ll make an elaboration.

Open Source

The term “Open source” defines software whose source code is made publicly available. They are eligible for use and modification by users, developers subject to certain conditions.

What makes an open source technology popular and favorable is:

• There’s no money cost for people to use the software.
• A big community (Users, developers, admin) exists to help one another.
• The software is stable because many developers & experts are testing it day by day. Should a trouble arise, a related request can be instantly submitted and resolved.
• Many open sources like Drupal are under the GNU Public License. That means the software is utterly free to download, use, and modify: There are no requirement for purchase, license, or maintenance fees.

Content Management System

In general, the CMS empowers content authors to manage website contents but do not own necessary technical skills to edit raw content. Specifically, it helps:

• Provide simple Web-based tools so that users can publish content directly to the website. E.g. Drupal provides a WYSIWYG editing tool that is similar to Word processing software of Microsoft.
• Control content author. As a web manager, you will able to control what is created, how the content is edited, formatted and reviewed. You can make some rules about the contents - to name a few: limit the character number in a content field; enable content items to follow a workflow process; require content fields such as page title, page path.
• Smoothen and boost the process. As your website grows into more than a few pages, and a number of formats, users,… content will become complex. To quicken this process, the CMS will make it easy to manage them all, and render them in quick and mass configuration.

What can Drupal do? And why is it different from other CMS?

There are many reasons why Drupal is the top three most used CMS, and why tons of small to big complex systems have made it their options. Here are those:

• Reliability. Drupal is one of the top three most popular content management systems in the world. It has a longstanding history. Though Drupal is a work in progress, it has been stable along the way. We have Drupal 7 now while Drupal 8 is going to be released. But you can be assured that you will be supported for Drupal previous version at least 5 years. Meanwhile, the resources will stay there for goods.
• Available resources. Nearly anything you want to do with the system has been priorly created and done absolutely well by other people. Other great news is nearly all of the most useful modules (Drupal add-ons) are contributed to the Drupal community. This is invaluable because in many CMS, you have to pay for important features. As a user, you have benefit greatly from someone’s efforts, and experience.
• A huge dedicated community. The Drupal community is large, dynamic and has functioned well since 2001. As a newbie, or a senior developer, Drupal.org is a must have resources where you dig in for learning material, upcoming news, or ask for support from contributors, and specialists.
• Robust and convenience. Be assured that the source code for building your Drupal sites has been precisely written, and designed by Drupal experts. When you have an intention to do more complex and advanced work, you will find it easy and convenient to modify the system. This grants users a great advantage over other CMS.
• Flexibility. It’s not a chance that Drupal is considered the most flexible CMS. We have always thought that if you have an idea about any functions, contents, you can certainly create it with Drupal. Seriously. You can create any content on site. You can customize anything to fit your taste. You can create any website type that you want.
• Scalability. By scalability, we mean that you can extend your Drupal core to a higher level with a variety of contributed Drupal modules. What’s great with the Drupal modules is that they integrate perfectly well with Drupal core. They also connect absolutely efficiently with the modules. This is regardless of the fact many modules are totally different. It is due to the natural structure & built in system of Drupal. This thereby enhances the power of extending your Drupal website. It is also a core strength of Drupal compared with other CMS. Meanwhile, Drupal is an open source. So suppose the modules you want don’t exist, you can create one, edit an existing module, or hire someone to do the job.
• Security. Drupal has been meticulously tested up to strict security rules by Drupal experts and contributors. Its built-in security is strong. Drupal will lock down whatever directory installed, rendering important data, configuration files unable to be accessed directly. No wonder that many big sites with extreme security are using Drupal, namely - whitehouse.org, commerce.gov, weforum.org,...

What are the uses of Drupal?

As stated, due to its flexibility and extensibility, Drupal is not limited to any kind. Browse these lists to see the wide range of things that Drupal can build:

• Personal or corporate Web sites
• Community portal sites
• Intranet/Corporate sites
• Blogs, art, portfolio, music, multimedia sites
• Forums
• International sites (websites with multi languages)
• E-commerce sites
• Resource directories
• Social networking sites

Some sampled Drupal sites

• White House: www.whitehouse.gov
• Twitter developer community: http://dev.twitter.com
• Zynga https://zynga.com/
• GE: www.ge.com
• New York Stock Exchange: www.nyse.com
• Virgin, several websites including: www.virgin.com

When Drupal isn't right?

If it is necessary to know about a system before we set our foot on, it’s never been less important to explore its cons. Here we bring some of our caveats for the system:

• There’s a little learning curve. You will not learn and work with Drupal in a few days. Accept this fact. It’s harder to start compared with other CMS like Wordpress. But once you learn some basic things, it’s easy, and the flow is smoother.
• It is not for those who have insufficient time to educate themselves about this system, or little money to pay a Drupal developer to carry out the work.
• Finding a good Drupal developer is harder to find than that of Wordpress or other systems. It’s not hard to guess this considering the number of Wordpress developers compared with Drupal.

It always takes some investments to learn about something. For a new user, it would be a huge opportunity cost - what you will gain and lose working with one system and leave others behind.
But after all the choice is always yours.We expect it would be worth. The CMS you will spend thousands hours working. The system through this you make a living. The option that yields energy and satisfaction.

Make the fulfilment long-lasting!

How many times you as a new webmaster, or even an experienced developer, are in two minds about

What open source content management system (CMS) would be the ideal option for my ecommerce store?

Which products are worth comparing for an online store?

It is not a piece of cake considering that there’s myriads of CMS. And in terms of CMS & products for an ecommerce website, there comes a bunch of excellent candidates: Wordpress, Joomlart, Drupal, Magento, Pretashop,…

But in this post, I’ll talk only about: Wordpress, Drupal, and Magento.

Theses three are the top options for an online store with the most usage over the Internet.

WordPress: where does it run out of room for a store?

The most prominent CMS so far. According to w3techs, Wordpress constitutes 61.1% of the CMS market share. It is widely used due to its friendliest CMS. Users with no prior technical experience can work with no difficulty. In terms of ecommerce features, there’re lots of plugins and toolkits to integrate: Woocommerce, WP-ecommerce, Cart66,…
However, the downside is that if Wordpress is easy to use for non technical users, it has some limitations for developers. If you want to change your website, you’ll find it less flexible to do than other CMS. For blogging, wordpress could be the best, but for a bigger system, and an ecommerce site, it does has restrictions.

Another setback is that it'll make you buy plug in extensions for important features that you need while those in are free in Drupal & Magento.

Magento: what do you give up on content management?

Naturally, Magento is not a content management system (CMS). It’s an ecommerce product. So everything of Magento is built to serve the purpose of an online store. It has great options to manage products, prices, taxes, database and so on. So, if you do want only a website of online shopping, it’s an excellent choice.
However, Magento does has a learning curve. If you want to do and custom your website, it takes time to learn. You can hire a Magento developer to do it for you. But the cost is not cheap.
Another point is that since Magento is not a CMS, it falls behind in content management. If you want to run a contest, build a blog, a community, and integrate some non traditional features for your website, you’ll find that Magento is hard to do this. You may think about installing another CMS for your blogs of your magento store, but always consider the hassle (time, money, the difficulty to manage two different systems of your websites).

Better version of Magento is not free (Magento Go – $180 – $1500 per year (billed monthly) and the best version with integrated content management system – Magento Enterprise with $15,000 / year is not for those with a tight budget. For a small business, you will find it costly, and there’re many features of the super package that you don’t even want for your ecommerce site.

Drupal: why does one integrated product suit a small or mid-size store?

Drupal is a powerful and flexible product, the 3rd most used open source CMS. Compared with Wordpress, it has a learning curve, yet it is far more extendable than Worpress. To start an ecommerce site on a Drupal product, just install Ubercart or Drupal Commerce, two of the best extensions for a shopping site. You can create a blog, a forum, a community and many function for your store with high usability and convenience.

And we believe that for a small & medium online business, with not much budget, an integrated product Drupal Ecommerce - Drupal with Drupal Commerce or Ubercart is the best solution.

What are the reasons to run the store on Drupal Commerce or Ubercart?

• Good content management. Drupal is by nature an open source CMS. So every features of content management can be done absolutely well with Drupal. About why your online store needs a content management functions, I’ll elaborate in the Marketing reason.
• An integrated product of a store and a strong content management. As I said earlier, for standalone ecommerce product like Magento, you have to install another decent CMS to work with content. However, there appear disadvantages – the time and money to learn, develop, and manage the 2 different systems; the obstacles to render their appearance to look similar. This is where Drupal rises. Drupal is by nature a strong content management. With its flexibility and enhancing, you can do find it highly convenient working with both your shopping features and the content.
• Drupal is praised for its structure, its extendability. With the core Drupal entity in conjunction with Views module, any content can be created. You can embed fields in it (image, text, videos, link, and no limitation). Any content can be displayed on your site. For example, you can create a product listing with images, slider any place on the site. Drupal can take more configuration than either Magento or WordPress, but it is more extendable.
• Drupal is free. I’m talking about the essential modules. If you need the extensions for your Drupal shopping site, just go along with all the free modules. And you have more than enough for your ecommerce site - Rooms, Commerce Marketplace, Commerce product display manager, Olark,… Meanwhile for your Wordpress site, you’ll have to pay for lots of plugins. For example ‘Product Slider Image Carousel’ is sold for $49 while you can build it in Drupal easily using a Views Slideshow, Field Slideshow, or jCarousel. Ready! plug in which brings in the rating system costs $29 while you can install it for free with the Fivestar module in Drupal.
• Easy third party and external system integration. This is the core strength of Drupal. Drupal modules have been built so that it can interact to one another and connect with the Drupal core firmly. With this in mind, Drupal Commerce and Ubercart are integrated in the highest level with Drupal. This thereby brings in a magnificent experience for your shopping site. And If you need to connect your ecommerce to Paypal, 2checkout, moneybooker, Mailchimp, Amazon, Google maps, Google Analytics, they are all there to be integrated within a few minutes.
• It takes time to learn. That’s the way it presents itself as Wordpress is for non technical users, and Drupal is for developers. It’s partly true but Drupal is not so hard as it seems since Drupal 7 has been much easier to learn compared to earlier versions. It’s worth educating yourself in the long term when you have comprehensive knowledge and power to manage your store. Also, you’ve had more than enough material on Internet with some google searches. If time is a valuable asset, hire a Drupal developer. The average hiring cost is much cheaper than hiring a Magento developer.
• Simple Marketing. It is important to remark that your ecommerce website is not just an online store. Looking for a long term strategy, there should be a content marketing plan– a blog with frequently updated contents, and a comprehensive SEO for your store and the content. Wordpress has some restrictions in its own commerce features, and flexibility while the free version of Magento is limited in content management and you have to install another CMS on your store. With Drupal, you have a much easier time working with content & the shopping cart without having to handle the SEO plans, website analytics,… in 2 different systems.
• High security. For an ecommerce website, it is absolutely important. Drupal is rated very high in terms of security. Take the White House as an example. It is built on Drupal. This CMS informs the users common security vulnerabilities, and bring them security reports. Dig into this article to know further.

So which one should you choose?

Every CMS and product has its own strength and weakness, and sometimes choosing a specific one lies on to our interest. It is the CMS you love, and have the most experience with.
But take our liking away. Based on our experience working with clients, and the CMS, we can assure that: You need a small, and medium ecommerce business. You treasure flexibility, extendable configuration, and an ease for content, and marketing. Then Drupal can’t be missed.

Editor's note, 2026. This list was written in August 2014, for Drupal 7. Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025. Several of the modules below are now part of Drupal core, several have been superseded, and the version numbers no longer apply. The post is kept because the problems it organises (routing, media, forms, search visibility, backups, commerce) are still the problems. What solves them has changed. Read "What changed since 2014" before you install anything from this list.

With its uniqueness and flexibility, Drupal has always been one of the top CMS. Besides the cores, the backbone of the Drupal system, what makes this CMS special is its large collection of modules. Let’s take a number of popular Drupal sites, can you find any of them don’t use even one extending modules? Needless to say, they are indispensable. They give you the ability to enhance the Drupal functions, features, and grant you the power to do many incredible tasks.

If you do a Google search, you can find some top Drupal choices and their specific functions. Similarly, in this post, we will bring you WeebPal’s module options. But what is different is these are based on our direct experience working with a variety of Drupal websites, delivering drupal themes, and creating modules. They are our favorite choices. They are the ones which have been used prevailingly in most of our projects.

Let’s browse through the lists:

Views

This is undoubtedly the most popular module we’ve seen in all Drupal websites, and also the vital module that we’ve built for most of WeebPal themes. Views gets our content displayed easier. It gives us the the convenience to show every field (content, taxonomy, terms, users,...) by any type of display. For example, you can create and display an image, a list of products, a jCarousel, Slideshow,... on your website.

Pathauto

Pathauto lets the user define pattern for data, and contents so that the system can create an automatic URL. This is a necessary module for a website with many and frequently new contents.

Administration Menu

This module is definitely invaluable for website administrators and developers. With Administration Menu, you can navigate to the admin menu any time via the smart menu bar on the top. This undeniably saves us valuable time in the process of working with the website.

Date

The Date module helps create a date field type in your Drupal system. It comes very handy when you need to create a chronological contents, calendar,...

Webform

If you want to create a contact form, an event registration, surveys, applications, you’ll find no modules better than Webform.

Wysiwyg

Wysiwyg by itself doesn’t work, but it is a tool allowing you to add content editors. In this means, you can edit and work with the content fairly easily and conveniently.

Views Slideshow

The module, as the name says, is used to generate a slideshow with Views. Slideshow has never been easier to create with the Views Slideshow.

Media

Media helps you manage documents, audio & video files. we like it because Drupal core is rather hard to handle with files & multimedias.

Context

The Context Drupal module allows showing different elements, or contents on your site based on conditions. For example, you may only want some blocks to show up at the bottom of the homepage, and change it to display differently on products page.

Ubercart

For a shopping & ecommerce website, it’s an awesome tool. Lots of our themes are using Ubercart, and it has supported us in everything related to the shopping flow from shopping cart, promotion to the payment. For users who want an simple and easy to use ecommerce module, we recommend Ubercart.

Drupal Commerce

Another module for the ecommerce website. New shopping, Marketplace, and Marvel use this. Same like Ubercart, this module assists you fairly well for an online store. From our experience, Drupal Commerce is harder to use and has a more complex structure.

Address Field

Address field creates a built in popular Address (City, country, state, zip code,...). You’ll find this absolutely useful if there’re addresses displayed on your site.

Custom Breadcrumb

For easy navigation, this module gets your breadcrumb path shown on your site. It can be integrated with Views, Panels, Taxonomy Vocabularies and Terms, Paths.

Gmap

Gmap module helps show your location on a Google map. This module is definitely useful if you want to show your company’s visual address; a property on a real estate website; a restaurant on a deal site. Should you not like the current display, you can customize your map to your purpose.

Video Embed Field

As the name has implied, if you want to to add some youtube videos, or vimeos on your site, you’ll find this module in handy.

Meta tags quick

The module adds meta tags such as title, descriptions, robots to get your page optimized on the search engine. A must have module for Search Engine Optimization.

Internationalization

Internationalization is a great extension to the core multilingual core Drupal. This allows publishing a multilanguage website and translating everything on a Drupal website.

ShareThis

For a website with a large number of contents, and its webmasters wants to get their content spread, ShareThis is a must. It displays the popular social networking accounts sharing icon on your site. This thereby promotes your contents on the users’ social networking accounts.

Fivestar

Akin to ShareThis, you’ll enjoy this module. This module allows users to rate your selected content by a 5 stars scale. By this, you can get your most rated content get noticed, and know which content is not okay, and needs improvements.

TB Megamenu

The core menu is not powerful. Use this one. Megamenu gives you a very flexible and incredible backend to create a menu.

Field Group

Field group helps you group fields together, which can be used for content types, taxonomy terms, and users.

Field collection

This module enhances the default Drupal entity by creating a new entity field to be composed and used by other fields. It combines a group of multiple related fields into one field, making it easy to manage them. You can re-use this field for mutliple content types, users,... and whenever you add fields.

Bean

Bean transform your core Blog module into a dynamic entity - node, vocabulary, users,... so that you can add multiple fields for your Blog content. You’ll find this module dramatically valuable if you use Blog regularly.

Quick Tabs

Quick Tabs is used to bring in blocks of tabbed content, namely views, blocks, nodes, and other quicktabs. One fabulous element of Quick Tab is its ability to hide tabs that have no content.

Backup and Migrate

Losing even a minor important data would be a nightmare for every webmaster. Use this and you’ll find it simple to save, restore, and transfer data from site to site.

Rules

The Rules module is a very powerful and flexible tool. It defines conditions for an action to occur. For example, you can use this module to send email, set messages, redirect to other pages on your site, and so on.

Features

What if you want to apply the same configuration from your site to another one? Features can perform this task. It permits exporting selected Drupal features, settings into a Drupal module. You can then install this on other Drupal sites.

Module Filter

We have to admit the built in core module search is terrible. Use this one. It will assist you to add vertical tabs and search modules easier.

Xml Sitemap

You must need a xml sitemap if you want your website search engine friendly. This module automatically generates a sitemap and keeps your site results up to date with sitemap.org standards.

Google Analytics

If you’re a webmaster, you must have known Google Analytics, the most popular traffic tracking tool for websites. This module will help you put and edit the Google Analytics code into your site directly, saving your time finding the pages & the places to put the tracking code in.

Well, this is our complete list. There’re some others modules we’ve used but didn’t include here. We guess the top 30 modules makes a long enough list. Do you have any recommendation to our list? Feel free tell us or ask any questions related to modules by leaving a comment below.

What changed since 2014?

Every line below is checkable on drupal.org. Where the current state of a module is something you should confirm yourself rather than take from a nine-year-old article, the table says so instead of guessing.

Module in this list	Where it stands now
Views	In Drupal core since Drupal 8. Nothing to install.
Media	In Drupal core, together with a media library.
Date	Replaced by core datetime fields.
WYSIWYG	Replaced by the core text editor, which ships CKEditor.
Administration menu	Superseded by the core toolbar; Admin Toolbar is the contributed successor most sites use.
Internationalization (i18n)	Replaced by core multilingual support.
Features	Replaced by core configuration management for the job most sites used it for.
Module Filter	The core Extend page has its own filter.
Bean	Replaced by core custom block types.
Address Field	Succeeded by the Address module.
Ubercart	Succeeded by Drupal Commerce for new builds.
Metatags Quick	Superseded by Metatag.
Field Collection	Largely superseded by Paragraphs.
Video Embed Field	Largely superseded by remote video in core Media.
Context	Core block layout covers most of what it was used for.
Pathauto, Webform, Backup and Migrate, XML Sitemap, Google Analytics, Rules, Field Group, Views Slideshow, TB Megamenu, Quicktabs, Custom Breadcrumbs, GMap, ShareThis, Fivestar	Still contributed modules. Check the project page on drupal.org for a current release before you plan around any of them: that is the only answer that stays true.

The pattern is worth naming, because it repeats: the modules that disappeared are the ones that solved a problem core later absorbed. That is how the product is supposed to work, and it is a reason to be conservative about contributed modules on a long-lived site. Every module you add is a thing that has to survive the next major upgrade.

If you are on Drupal 7 and reading this, the module list is not your first problem: the end-of-life date was January 2025. That is a migration, and it is a project rather than an upgrade.

Where to go from here

If you are planning a Drupal build or a move off Drupal 7, the module list is downstream of two earlier decisions: what the system has to do, and who will own the code afterwards.

• Drupal development: how we build, and what a build includes.
• Drupal migration: moving off an end-of-life version without losing the data or the URLs.
• Pricing: the published bands, and what fixes the price.
• You own the code: why every engagement ships the full repository.