Why Drupal is the Preferred CMS for Universities Worldwide

Drupal is the most used web builder for the world’s Top 50 universities (32%), with WordPress standing far behind at 2nd place (8%). But why? In this article, we’ll give you the reasons why Drupal is such a great choice, specifically for large and/or complex website structures such as higher education websites.

Fun fact: Drupal has more high-traffic websites than WordPress despite the massive volume gap? Source

Reasons Why Top Universities Use Drupal

1. Unrivaled Security

Among the 3 CMS giants between WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, Drupal had the least amount of cyberattacks since 2005. This says a lot about its security. Much like other open-sourced CMS platforms, Drupal is consistently passing OWASP standards for software security. Its security teams operate in 3 continents and is responsible for real-time security patches whenever new vulnerabilities arise. With upwards of 1 million software developers constantly contributing to the platform and reporting bugs, it’s safe to say that universities using Drupal are as safe on the internet as it gets.

2. Intuitive Content Organization

Drupal’s Group Module helps universities create independence between various faculties, departments, and branches while still maintaining organization using a unified management system at the backend. Its taxonomy system allows administrators to classify sections into groups, making the website convenient to use, navigate, and manage.

3. Fully Customizable Website Structure & Design

Drupal is a highly versatile content management system platform in terms of functionality and design. There are 2 main reasons for this. One, plainly because it’s open-sourced, and therefore gives developers complete freedom to customize every detail, and two, because it has tons of community-made themes.

Drupal websites help institutions fully realize the UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) they intend with little to no compromise.

4. Multi-Level User Permissions

Unlike SMBs which typically has 2-3 permission levels, higher education institutions carry multiple with varying degrees and specifications that other CMS platforms just cannot provide.

With an open source CMS like Drupal, universities can set permissions specific to administrators, professors, students, alumni, visitors, and much more. This unique feature helps the uni’s target audience experience the website the way it’s intended for them.

5. Multiple Inclusivity Features

Drupal strives to be inclusive with its assistive / accessibility technologies such as text-to-speech tools (vice versa), quick hardware inputs, screen magnification tools, etc. In addition to this, it also supports 100+ languages. This helps universities attract both prospective students with disabilities and international students.

6. Highly Scalable Websites and Pages

A university website is rich with content and needs a lot of “space” for announcements, news, research, departments, etc. Drupal's scalability stands out because it can handle complex structures and hundreds of pages with ease.

Multisite is a feature that lets admins centrally control all the sites under the domain name through shared code and themes. This helps unify issues and solves them without having to individually fix each site.

For managing independent sites, Drupal has an extension called Group Module. It allows users to create groups of multiple sizes even within other groups. For example, the University of Cambridge has ‌6 branches, 31 semi-autonomous colleges, and over 150 departments. With this module, you have the option to segregate and manage them as independent sites. Currently, Drupal has over 40,000 modules ready to use.

Top Universities Using Drupal for their website

1. University of Cambridge
2. University of Oxford
3. Princeton University
4. Yale University
5. University College London
6. University of Pennsylvania
7. University of Toronto
8. University of Edinburgh
9. PSL University
10. McGill University

Want a full, updated list of all the universities around the world using Drupal? Visit our article about the Top 50 Universities that use Drupal. There, we tabulate top universities such as MIT, Stanford and Harvard, and cite their notable websites and pages made using Drupal.

Xenyo is a fast-growing Drupal agency that has been developing websites for more than a decade. We develop and design websites for majority of the universities in Hong Kong.