Why Drupal Is The Right Choice For Your Lead Generation Website

Whether you are in the market for a new website or in the process of evaluating different content management systems, you’ve most likely heard the name Drupal at one point or another. In case you haven’t, Drupal is a robust open-source content management system (CMS) that can be used for creating websites and website applications.

I will tell you why Drupal is the right choice for your lead generation website, as outlined in the sections below.

Cost

How much does your copy of Drupal cost? Zero dollars. It is a free, open-source project — and your copy can be obtained in minutes by visiting the Drupal website (https://www.drupal.org/). All of the necessary contributed modules are free as well. The cost of a Drupal site comes with the setup, configuration and theme creation of the site, but there is no cost for the software itself. This is drastically different from many other enterprise-level CMS solutions that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing and support over the lifespan of the website.

Large Developer Community

Drupal has a very large community of developers (numbering in the millions) that is growing every year. This means you won't have trouble finding a developer who can work on your site several years down the road. It also means just about any functionality you want to add to your website has probably been built by someone else previously, and there is a strong possibility a module exists that can be installed on your website to give you that same functionality — or, at the very least, a good base for adding it.

Complex Functionality Made Easy

Using Drupal allows us to build very complex pieces of functionality in a fraction of the time and with far less effort than it would take to build from scratch. As noted above, a large community of Drupal developers has made this possible by continually contributing code (in the form of modules) that allows you to extend the base functionality of Drupal. As a result, you are able to get an enterprise-level site without the enterprise-level price tag. As of April 2015, there were more than 31,000 contributed modules available for Drupal.

Speed

Everyone knows that in today’s day and age website speed is a critical factor in the search engine rankings and user experience of your website. This is one area where Drupal is heads and tails above other content management systems. The built-in caching functionality available in Drupal is second to none, and it allows for easy caching of just about everything on your site. This really helps speed up your page load time and allows users to access your content quickly and easily. To further increase page load times on sites built at Straight North, we host all our Drupal sites at Acquia, where we have access to a very powerful reverse-proxy caching layer called Varnish, which makes website pages load lightning-fast.

Security

In terms of security, Drupal is one of the top content management systems available. If you’ve ever been the owner or maintainer of WordPress sites, you know all too well just how easy it is to hack them and just how often they get hacked. This is not something anyone wants to deal with, and it is often a very expensive problem to remedy. Drupal core and all its contributed modules have been strengthened over time — from peer review and from the dedicated Drupal security team — to ensure that Drupal is one of the most secure CMS solutions for enterprise-level websites.

Easy Form Creation

Another great feature of Drupal is the ability to create lead forms on your website with just a few mouse clicks. This makes it easy to add new lead-capture forms to your website at any time. It also makes editing of existing forms very easy, in case changes are needed after launch. This ensures that future changes can be mostly done by your in-house marketing team, without incurring additional website development costs.

Integration With Third-Party Services

Most marketing departments these days rely on third-party marketing automation software or CRM systems to help automate repeatable process and help streamline communication. All of these systems, however, need to integrate with your website in order to work exactly how you need them. This is another area where Drupal shines. With so many Drupal developers in the community working on so many different projects, most common software integrations have already been done and turned into modules. This allows for complex integration projects to be completed in a few hours rather than a few days.

In closing, these are just a handful of reasons why Drupal is our primary CMS of choice when building a new lead generation website for a client. These are the same reasons we would highlight when a client is on the fence between Drupal and another CMS.

Using Drupal allows for building complicated websites and website applications in the fraction of the time it would take to build from scratch — and you can rest easy knowing that your site is secure and built on a solid, proven foundation that many developers will be able to work on for years to come.