Drupal currently holds 1.95% of the overall market share, and it includes websites with heavy traffic and vast content repositories. While specifically in the education market, 71% of top universities like Brown, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton and many more use Drupal as their Content Management System (CMS) platform.

As you further dive into the CMS market, it’s very evident that Drupal is the ultimate choice for universities with extensive requirements like managing multiple websites, heavy traffic loads, maintaining robust security or giving a personalized experience to students. It’s Drupal’s flexibility, scalability, enhanced security and accessibility that makes it all the more reliable digital experience platform.

While WordPress has its own set of benefits, there are some unwanted challenges that can affect the digital experience of your university website. Thus, WordPress to Drupal migration can help you achieve the goal of digital success with a highly functional and flexible website.

The limitations of WordPress for large university websites

Before heading towards the advantages of WordPress to Drupal migration, let’s look at some of the challenges that universities are or will be facing with WordPress.

WordPress is a popular CMS platform that empowers almost 35% of all websites due to its simplicity and easy-to-use framework. Thus, it has been a good choice to build and maintain a simple website.

On the other hand, university websites are large and require detailed management and maintenance. As universities constantly experience growth, they want to enhance the web digital experience through enhanced and faster digital content delivery, improving security standards or managing internal website user roles and permissions. However, WordPress can throw some limitations in terms of scalability, flexibility, performance, and security that might hamper your website growth.

Some of the key challenges that a university website may encounter are:

• Limited customization - There is a wide range of WordPress themes and plugins, but extensive customization to meet the branding needs of large university websites can be challenging. As you add more features and functionality, you may encounter conflicts between plugins, leading to compatibility issues and potential website instability.


• Security vulnerabilities - Universities often handle sensitive data, including student records and research information. WordPress is known for its susceptibility to security breaches, significantly when not regularly updated and secured, and thus relies on plugins and constant monitoring. While plugins and outdated software exacerbate weaknesses, high-profile breaches have impacted universities using WordPress CMS.


• Difficulty in scaling - WordPress may struggle to handle the high traffic and extensive content that large university websites typically have. You may experience performance issues as the site grows, leading to slow page load times and potential downtime. Its traditional LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack architecture also complicates horizontal scaling.


• Fragmented governance - With site management spread across domains like IT, marketing, admissions, and academics, WordPress's site-wide control model makes it hard to distribute ownership. Therefore, leading to affected content workflow, increased dependency or unnecessary access.


• Unstructured content - Large university websites often have a vast amount of content, including courses, research projects, events, and more. WordPress's default content organization may not be sufficient for complex information hierarchies and building a robust and intuitive content structure can be difficult and may require custom development.

As your university's web presence continues to mature, these constraints make it worth re-evaluating WordPress as your CMS foundation.

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Key benefits of WordPress to Drupal migration

Drupal, an open-sourced and composable content platform offers many benefits that can align with university goals and help you streamline your digital growth and experience. While migrating to Drupal requires detailed planning, you must first learn about the essential benefits it offers:

1. More robust functionality

With Drupal as the enterprise CMS, it offers extensive capabilities that help you build a highly functional website. For instance, you can build a personalized student portal where students can register for courses, access grades, and submit assignments seamlessly. This empowers students to easily access the essential services and information, reducing administrative workload.

Also, Drupal's role-based access control allows universities to precisely manage user permissions, like faculty members can be granted exclusive access to course creation and editing tools, while students have read-only access.

That’s not all, Drupal also empowers universities with more functionality to cater to a larger audience. It offers advanced features like custom registration and enrollment workflows at the time of admissions, for instance, implementing a multi-stage enrollment process with document verification and departmental approvals. Further, it eases content workflow, revisioning and translation helping content managers and editors to deliver all types of content seamlessly.

2. Enhanced customization and branding

To build and maintain trust and credibility amongst students and staff, universities must focus on tailored and consistent online identity. Drupal CMS provides tools and capabilities that allow universities to execute sophisticated branding and designs effortlessly. It allows universities to unify messaging and user experiences (UX) across various sub-sites, such as central, departmental, and program-specific websites.

It helps you implement the university's unique color schemes, logos, typography, and visual elements consistently across the website, ensuring a cohesive appearance that aligns with the institution's identity.

With the help of Drupal’s extensive customization capabilities, universities can craft memorable digital experiences that reinforce their brand. For example, you can design visually stunning landing pages for different departments, programs, or campaigns, each with its own distinct look and feel while maintaining a coherent overarching brand identity.

3. Improved performance and scalability

Universities experience significant spikes in website traffic during admissions and enrollment periods. Drupal's performance improvements and scalability features ensure that the website can handle these surges without slowdowns or downtime. Its architecture can efficiently manage the increased demand, preventing disruptions in the user experience. The caching mechanisms and optimized code also contribute to faster page load times and overall responsiveness.

Further, Drupal also allows for horizontal scaling which means you can add additional servers to your infrastructure to separate the load. In case of sudden traffic spikes during events or admissions, you can seamlessly add more servers behind a load balancer to distribute the load. Thus, never stopping a large university website from scaling while also avoiding any web crashes.

4. Stronger security posture

Drupal has a reputation for its robust security architecture and a dedicated security team working 24*7 to actively monitor and address vulnerabilities. This means that when you migrate WordPress to Drupal, you're benefiting from a platform that places a strong emphasis on security. Drupal releases regular security updates and patches to address potential vulnerabilities promptly, reducing the risk of security breaches.

In the case of large universities that are hosting multiple sites simultaneously, Drupal’s robust security is one of the biggest benefits. It enables you to isolate these sites from each other. If one site is compromised, it won't necessarily affect the security of others. This isolation strategy helps limit potential attack surfaces and contains security incidents.

Also, unlike WordPress, Drupal reduces reliance on third-party extensions and minimizes the risk associated with plugin vulnerabilities.

5. More agile governance

Drupal's role-based access control and permission system enable different teams to securely manage their content and sites within a unified platform. This means that faculty, staff, and administrators can create and update their content without the risk of inadvertently affecting other parts of the website. For instance, the IT department can oversee technology-related content, while the marketing department handles promotional materials, all within a secure and controlled environment.

Drupal also provides built-in tools for content modeling, permissions, and workflow management. For example, a university can establish content creation workflows that require content to pass through multiple stages of approval before publication, ensuring quality and consistency. Content modeling tools enable the creation of structured content types specific to each department or program, streamlining content creation and maintenance.

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Altudo’s WordPress to Drupal migration approach

WordPress Drupal migration can be time-consuming, and complex while also requiring strategic planning and evaluation. But to make this transition a successful and seamless journey, you must facilitate support from experts and experienced professionals for website migration services.

Altudo has many years of experience in crafting digital excellence for many large organizations using open-source CMS as Drupal. Our team of learned and experienced Drupal experts can guide you with their years of experience and practice about how to seamlessly migrate WordPress to Drupal and enjoy the extensive capabilities of Drupal.

Our Drupal experts can help you:

• To establish clear business goals, success metrics, and a governance model. Our experts also help you create a highly detailed migration plan, carefully optimized for reliability, scalability, and speed.


• Host collaborative workshops to ensure alignment on-site mapping, wireframes, design systems, and user experience (UX) considerations. Along with constructing a tailored Drupal environment that caters to your specific requirements.


• Employ custom scripts to securely migrate databases, files, and media assets. Our experts optimize content models and taxonomies to enhance findability.


• Perform rigorous user testing and quality assurance checks of your new Drupal site across various devices, browsers, and use cases.


• Equip your administrative staff with the necessary training and resources to efficiently manage the new Drupal platform. Consequently, providing end-user guidance to facilitate a smooth transition to the updated interfaces.

Conclusion

It is extremely crucial for university websites to be built on a reliable and secure CMS platform. A platform that can help the website to create a strong base, scale up and down, create personalized digital experiences with content delivery at speed or provide information seamlessly.

Drupal CMS with its robust architecture is an ideal choice for many renowned universities and its consistent upgrades, the latest being Drupal 10, also offers many capabilities and better functionality. Altudo offers extensive Drupal services like Drupal web development, migration/upgrades, multi-site management, continuous support and much more. Our team of Drupal experts can help you with detailed guidance and support in your website migration journey.

So, if you feel ready for migrating WordPress site to Drupal then do not hesitate. Connect with our experts at marketing@altudo.co and design your roadmap to a flexible and functional website.