Core and Customization

WordPress and Drupal are both open-source (under GNU license) PHP-based CMS. They both have reach functionality out of the box, and they both support modules for more features. WordPress is more popular. It has more available modules and adds on in comparison with Drupal. It also has a more significant community of contributors and developers, although the one of Drupal is not small too.
WordPress has more available themes too. If you choose it, you will have more possibility for creating the best website for you.

Ease of use

Both content management systems are easy to learn. People will say that WordPress is more accessible, especially the backend part of it, but it depends strongly on your use. For a blog site, the two are excellent and easy to set up. WordPress has an edge for faster installation. Many hosting providers have a tool for installing it in just a few minutes.
Drupal is more complicated, and it will be harder to customize. It might require additional knowledge of PHP, CSS, and HTML.

Security

In this round, Drupal is the winner. In order to be competitive, Drupal’s developing team has focused their effort on security. They often post about security fixes on their page, and they regularly provide patches.
WordPress’s security is not horrible. The popularity of it also has a negative effect too. There are far more websites that use WordPress, and this is why there are more hackers’ attacks on those kinds of sites. You can reinforce the security with a 3rd party plug-in, and that way is safer.

Speed

In their purest form, without any cache boosts, Drupal wins this round of WordPress vs Drupal. It is less heavy. It is recommended for websites with many pages. If you want to use WordPress don’t get sad. There are ways to speed it up, check our article “5 tips to speed up WordPress website.”

SEO

We can’t have a WordPress vs Drupal comparison without paying attention to the search engine optimization. As we said already, Drupal is a bit faster which helps with the SEO. Both support custom URLs and responsive design. They both support similar plug-ins for additional SEO help. In this department, the two platforms are a tie.

Conclusion about WordPress vs Drupal

We have chosen WordPress for our blog, because of the simplicity and ease of use. We can recommend it to anyone, who needs a blog for their site. It is fast to set up, and it is mobile friendly.

For people with more experience in website building and who wants to create bigger and more complicated websites, Drupal can be the better platform. It will handle multiple-page sites better, but it will require more time to set it up.

Whatever you choose, you can add extra reliability and speed with a premium DNS. See our DNS plans and choose the right for you.

Which is the best DNS for my business?

Just before we leave you, we want to share with you several examples of websites built with the two platforms. You can see that both platforms produce excellent sites.

WordPress

The New Yorker
BBC America
Variety
Sony Music
Mercedes-Benz

Drupal

Grammy.com
NASA
Harvard University
Nokia
London City

The post WordPress vs Drupal, which CMS to choose? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

Magento, what is it?

Magento is an open-source CMS owned by Adobe. The platform is free* and that is why it is the popular choice of many small companies. It is also easily expandable through extensions from the Magento Marketplace. This makes it very customizable. Another benefit is the huge developers’ community behind it. The people have created a rich ecosystem around it, and they are adding new elements quite often.

Thanks to the massive interest in the platform, there are many experts in Magento and finding Magento support employees or Magento SEO experts is not hard. There is also a certification program from the brand.

Big companies also love it. Many well-known brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Ford, use it.
According to Alexa, from the most visited 1 million sites in the world, 19.64% use Magento (January 2018). It is the number one e-commerce platform, just in front of WooCommerce.
The Enterprise version of Magento cost 18 000 USD (Magento 2 starts at 22 000 USD). It is not free like the one for small and medium-size businesses, but it is still affordable for big brands.

Benefits of Magento

Free*

We already mention it, that there are two versions, the Community one, and the Enterprise. The first is free, and you can see the whole source code and how to install it here in GitHub.

Easy to install

You can get it from GitHub, Magento’s website or even from your web hosting provider for free. You need to follow a step-by-step process that will take you less than half an hour. If you experience any difficulties, there are plenty of YouTube tutorials on how to set it up.

Magento is full of features

It has a massive amount of pre-installed features like personalized products, purchase order management, promotion management, newsletter and more. Companies can start using it immediately, even without installing additional extensions.

SEO-friendly

E-commerce sites need all the help they can get with their SEO. They contain plenty of products and many unique pages. Magento is well-built out of the box with proper URLs, good control over the meta tags, XML sitemap and responsive design (it adapts to different screens and devices). Many extensions can help you too.

Multi-sites, a single control

Magento gives you the opportunity to install multiple sites from the same installation. Later you can set different currencies and languages for each from the same back-end administration panel. It is very convenient and saves time. If you are planning to use the multi-sites option, we recommend you to apply GeoDNS. It will increase the speed of your site, improve the SEO and it can potentially increase your sells.

Easy integration

The platform is already in a grown stage, there are plenty of developers behind it, and it is visible. It is very easy to integrate it with third-party services like – payment gateways, inventory software, shipment tracking systems and analytic software.

Magento VS Shopify – a detailed comparison

Cons of Magento

The platform is great, but it doesn’t mean it is flawless. There are few of the disadvantages that it has that are worth mentioning:

Heavy for cheap web hosting

If you want to use it with many products, it is better to rent private servers instead of a shared web hosting. You will need all the resources of the servers because there will be many operations to be made.

Time-consuming

The high customization has its price, and it is time. Yes, it gives you more options than other competitors, but it could take extra time to complete a specific task.

Enterprise version is expensive

If you want to benefit from the features of the Enterprise version, it will cost you an arm and a leg. Due to the price, just big companies with many sells or very expensive products can afford it.

Conclusion

Magento is a great way to begin with e-commerce. It covers all the necessary check boxes and even exceeds the expectations. It is the number one e-commerce platform right now, and it is totally worth it.

The post Magento, is it a good e-commerce platform? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

What is Drupal CMS?

Drupal is an open-source CMS that was created by Dries Buytaert. Dries is a Dutch and his initial idea about the name of his project was dorp (a village in Dutch). Later he changed his mind and registered it as Drop (drop.org). The open-source nature of the project led to significant interest, and many contributors joined. In 2001, Dries lunch it as a CMS and called it Drupal (from the Dutch word “druppel” which means a drop).

Drupal that we know today is a CMS that works under GNU General Public License, and it is written in PHP. According to W3Techs, 2%(August 2018) of all websites in the world use Drupal.
Between them are Grammy.com, NASA, Harvard University, Nokia, London City and many more.

Advantages of Drupal

Open-source

It is open-source and free. The complete source code is available, so you can get it and use it according to the GNU license. It is an attractive platform for new website owners who don’t want to spend a lot of money.

Reach core features

The core of Drupal has everything that you need to start a site – system administration, account management, layout customization, RSS-feeds and more.

Support for template

If you don’t want to start from scratch, there are plenty of templates available. You can modify the menus and create a good looking site that is suited for your needs.

Good content creation

Drupal has an excellent article creation tools out of the box. With the help of some extensions, you can create stunning multimedia content that includes music, video, text, podcasts and more.

Content management

The platform is well-organized. You can put the articles into categories, change their URLs and many attributes. You can manage, who can see specific content, who can edit it, who can see just the statistic and more.

Disadvantages of Drupal

Interface

New users can experience difficulty understanding the interface. Yes, there are plenty of options, but it is often hard to understand how to use them. It has significantly improved over the years, but still, it is harder to understand than WordPress or Joomla.

Less popular than WordPress

WordPress has taken the world by storm. It is the most popular CMS by a large margin, and that is an important factor. Even though there are many extensions for Drupal and big community, still WordPress has more. The most prominent developers have WordPress as a priority and put less time on extensions for Drupal.

Hard to update and install modules

Most of the installations and updates are made through FTP. This makes it a bit harder to administrate in comparison with the competition.

Conclusion

Drupal is the third most popular CMS out there, and it is worth your attention. It is very versatile, and it has a huge community behind. You can quickly adapt it to your need. Is it better than the rest? It really depends on your needs and your previous knowledge in site management and creation. It can be a bit harder to learn than WordPress, but it more flexible and it can adapt to your desire.

The post Drupal. Is it a good CMS? appeared first on ClouDNS Blog.

1. Choose a good web hosting

As we said earlier, speed is essential. Choosing a good web hosting is not easy. Many of the web hosting companies don’t show all of the information to the public, so you need to ask extra. The most important aspects are that the servers are modern, that they use SSD, they give you enough resources for you (what percentage of the shared resources are you getting), physical location and of course the price. The web hosting might be the most significant investment so take your time.

2. Use a barebone theme

Barebone WordPress theme might be a bit contra logical to you but bear with us for a moment. Yes, a barebone theme will be less spectacular, but again our primary concern is speed. It will load a lot faster and give you an advantage in the Google ranking. You need to be sure that the theme is mobile-friendly too. This is a very cheap update.

3. Optimize images

And this one is entirely free! Use a compressed format like .JPG for your images and keep the resolution down. You don’t need a full 20Mpx image, especially when most of the internet traffic comes from mobile with an average 1080p display. Use 1MPx image and your pages will load fast and still provide a quality post for your visitors. For the resizing, you can use an online site or download a image resizing application on your device.

4. Speed up WordPress using caching plugin

There are free and paid options. We recommend you WP Super Cache. This one creates static HTML files that most of your visitors will see instead of the WordPress PHP scripts. Html is lighter and easier to load.

5. Use CDN

You can create your own CDN (content delivery network) using DNS. It will give you the chance to have many more point of presence in the world. Like this, your users from China will be redirected from the servers close to them in Asia and the ones in The US will have others close by. It will significantly reduce the time to load for your page, and you can use it with all of the previous speed up WordPress tips.

If you are interested, you can check our GeoDNS or talk to our sales team that can give you extra details.  It is relatively inexpensive, and it gives excellent results.

Conclusion

To be one step ahead of your competitors is not easy, but with good research and some tweaks, you can get far better results. Some of these speed up WordPress optimizations cost extra money, but when you see the difference in reach and positioning you will be content.

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