Drupal

One of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) in the world, Drupal has an active community comprising more than 1.39 million members, with more than 46,800 free modules, over 2900 free themes and at least 1,300 free distributions. These statistics aside, Drupal is the perfect choice for large and more complex websites and a preferred platform by experienced developers.

The advantages of using Drupal for developing your website are many. Starting from its clear documentation process to security, vast readymade modules to open content architecture, Drupal offers a lot of benefits. But before we jump into the “why”, let us first try to understand the “what” of web development for your business.

What Goes into Web Development?

The relevance of moving businesses, ideas and profiles online is known to all. The internet has, after all, emerged as the single most powerful tool in the hands of both buyers and sellers, making online presence a must for both. For businesses, especially eCommerce ventures, this can come through a well-designed website.

Web design is critical when creating an eCommerce website – everything from fonts, colours, words, images to graphics is crucial for attracting potential leads and converting them. The design should have enough breathing space and should talk about who you are as a brand. At the same time, it should have a professional touch. The website should be able to cater to support multiple languages and devices, should be easy to navigate and provide optimum user experience in terms of product viewing and checkout.

Why You Should Choose Drupal for Web Development

Designing an effective eCommerce website is tricky. There are so many things to take care of. This is where Drupal scores high. It is a reliable, safe and agile content management system that comes equipped with all the features you want for your website. With the extent of customisation and module extensions on the platform, you can sell and speak better.

Open-Source Platform

Drupal is an open-source platform, which means it is free and allows a lot of leverage to web designers and content managers in terms of content. With Drupal, you can easily model the website’s appearance as per your needs, paying attention to even the smallest details.

Offers Seamless Content Workflow

Drupal comes packed with all the tools and features content managers need for creating, publishing and updating content on their website. The seamless editorial workflow is powered by an efficient framework and experience-centric features.

Content creators can produce, evaluate and edit content from various devices, anytime and anywhere. In-place editing allows you to edit the content on pages right where they are, without shifting to a new tab and losing the web preview. Drupal also provides features of content tagging and taxonomy, helping define elements and attributes as well as making content easily searchable.

Provides Out-Of-The-Box Language Support

One of the primary focus areas of an eCommerce website should be to cater to local user experiences if they want to expand geographically. With Drupal’s multilingual support, you can effectively create websites that score high in localised digital experiences.

Drupal’s core modules enable content configuration and translation for every part of your website, including administrator and content producer interfaces. This enables Drupal to be installed in more than 90 languages through dedicated packages without the need for any extra components.

Has Unlimited Options for Expansion

Drupal comes packed with several additional modules that together can cater to even the most complex functional needs with a few clicks. This comes in handy for eCommerce websites where a lot of operations are going on behind the customer screen. You can extract a lot from Drupal’s extensive documentation and detailed API either yourself or through a professional web developer.

Offers a Content-as-a-Service Approach

Website development involves front- and back-end development, both of which can be decoupled with Drupal to deliver reusable content when needed. This enables building better user experiences along with easier third-party integration of content such as websites and applications. Drupal’s CaaS approach offers flexibility and ease of use to content managers like no other platform can.

Allows Multi-Site Setup

IF you are handling multiple businesses or subsidiaries, you must create and maintain separate websites for each. With Drupal, which offers a multisite setup to its users, entrepreneurs can administer multiple websites across geographies, campaigns and brands on a single central platform, reducing the costs and time for managing them on separate ecosystems.

Secure

Drupal has a proven record of being the most secure CMS, beating several big names in the market. A report from Sucuri highlights that Drupal is the best security-centric CMS compared to competitors such as WordPress and Joomla. The platform stands firm against critical internet liabilities and has an active professional team constantly validating and responding to security issues.

Drupal comes with built-in support for hashing account passwords multiple times when they are stored in the database. It offers strong password policy enforcement, session limits, single sign-on systems and authentication practices in place. With the help of a professional Drupal web designer, you can configure the platform further for firm database encryption to prevent malicious data entry and prevent brute-force password attacks. Drupal also offers a multi-layered cache architecture along with other features that address the internet’s top security concerns.

Scalable

Every eCommerce venture aims to become busier and larger, gaining more and more traffic for their website and content. If you are eyeing such growth as well, or are already trying to handle huge web traffic, Drupal assists by scaling with your needs.

Drupal’s scalability also takes care of maintaining a rich customer experience and efficient content management, no matter how many visitors and content contributors you tackle. Managing large volumes of content, visitors and users is hassle-free with Drupal.

Mobile-Responsive

Mobile eCommerce sales are projected to contribute towards 72.9% of total eCommerce sales by 2021. Websites that are not designed to be responsive see higher bounce rates. This itself speaks about the importance of responsive design for websites. Responsive design simply means that your website works perfectly well across any device the visitor uses – desktops, laptops, mobiles and so on. Drupal eliminates duplicate content and delivers an optimal visitor experience across mobiles.

Getting Help from a Professional Drupal Web Developer

Drupal genuinely has a lot to offer, with an array of tools and features at the developer’s disposal. However, to be able to extract the maximum benefit, you must consider hiring a professional web developer who is deft with coding, best practices and content management system interfaces.