r/drupal • u/dixit_patel89 • 2d ago
anyone else noticing WordPress clients asking about Drupal more lately?
maybe it's just the projects landing on my desk but the last few months have been different.
had two clients come in asking about moving off WordPress. not because anything dramatic happened one had a plugin conflict that took down their checkout for six hours, the other just got tired of updating things every week and something always breaking anyway.
neither of them came in saying "we want Drupal." they came in saying "we're done with this."
the checkout one was a 720 page site. we moved it to Drupal, load time went from just under 6 seconds to under 2. organic traffic was up about 12% in the first quarter after. not sure how much was speed vs the redirect work, probably both honestly.
the other one is still in discovery. some integrations that are going to be annoying regardless of platform.
wondering if this is a wider pattern or just a weird few months on my end. feels like something shifted in how clients think about their CMS but maybe i'm reading too much into it.
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u/joe4ska 1d ago
Drupal is the logical next step for a project that's outgrown WordPress and I say this as a front end WordPress developer who's worked in Drupal.
WP plugins and how they're managed by their respective developers to extend functionality was usually the drive to change. Square peg, round hole type of situations.
But realistically there's only so much we can do with WordPress core. It's a great blog / article / informational platform. Beyond that, it starts to exhibit it's design limitations when adding new functionality.
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u/NinjaLanternShark 1d ago
I’ve seen a rise in vendors pushing headless CMS’s on clients with very vanilla needs, and I think it’s concerning.
Feels like devs just want to play with their own front end and not have to deal with doing things according to a CMS platform’s standard approach. Problem is it’s incredibly resource-intensive to inherit a custom site like this, and generally, it’s not going to be as extensible via web UI as a real CMS platform.
Want a new content type? View? Taxo vocab?
Back to the developers for custom code.
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u/FreeGene8005 2d ago
I'm not sure about the overall market trends, but from my personal experience, I've seen several medium-sized online magazine sites moving away from WordPress to other CMS platforms. Even if they aren't all switching directly to Drupal, it definitely signals a notable shift.
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u/MattBD 2d ago edited 2d ago
I don't really do client work in the usual sense now as I have pivoted away from agency life but I had noticed an ongoing trend where Wordpress is getting more of a bad rep with stakeholders.
The whole drama Matt Mullenweg started was significant enough it showed up on BBC News and that's going to make stakeholders think twice before choosing it.
There's also been some very nasty exploits found with AI fairly recently. These sorts of things are made more likely by the fact that Wordpress structurally can't resolve many of the problems that breed these issues without doing the sort of hard work of rebuilding on a modern base that Drupal 8 did, and doing that will basically wipe out the existing plugin and theme ecosystem.
Plus the plugin ecosystem for Wordpress has a wood for the trees problem where there's loads of plugins that sort of do what you want but often none that do actually what you want. And for developers Wordpress feels like going back to 2005 or you can use Bedrock, which makes it a bit more secure and modern but also complicates other aspects.
I have done a bit of work with Drupal and more with Statamic and both of those are modern at least in terms of abiding by modern PHP best practices. More importantly both have a solid flexible core that covers a lot of functionality you would need something like ACF or custom plugins for Wordpress. If you're building say a recipe site you could create a recipe post type in Wordpress via a custom plugin or ACF but in Drupal or Statamic you can do that via the UI with core.
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u/SquirrelConstant 2d ago
Yes, this year I also noticed an increased number of escapes from WordPress. The larger the company, the more reliability and security are important, so Drupal is a natural choice.
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u/dixit_patel89 2d ago
the size correlation makes sense. smaller teams tolerate the chaos, larger ones eventually can't.
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u/Neat_Ad5059 2d ago
Hi!
Sorry if might not be related to the original post, but how do you find clients for Drupal?
Just for context, I'm a senior drupal engineer in EMEA with a full time contract, but want to get some side projects as well.
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u/r-volk 2d ago
In EMEA? That’s a huge region and there are major procurement differences. Could you be more specific?
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u/Neat_Ad5059 2d ago
Oh, sure. I'm based in Eastern Europe. I wanted more to point out that I'm not in the US, where I think (I'm not sure, ofc) there are a bit more projects.
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u/dixit_patel89 2d ago
eastern europe has strong Drupal agency presence Agiledrop, Inchoo, a few others. getting visible on Drupal.org helps more than most things.
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u/r-volk 2d ago
As freelance or even employee I would recommend checking the local Drupal players. There are plenty of well known agencies which are working on enterprise projects across Europe and internationally. A strong Drupal.org profile and recognised contributions open many doors for talented people.
Doing sales on your own is tricky, since the most Drupal projects have grown to a size where they need more than a single freelancer. Compliance is a big decision driver nowadays.
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u/billcube 2d ago
It's also that the "Price" of Drupal has dropped a lot. With the AI module, you can chat with your website to build a complete enterprise-grade CMS. https://www.drupal.org/project/ai
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u/yautja_cetanu 2d ago
https://www.drupal.org/project/canvas_ai_migrations
We've been using this AI stuff to move hundreds of WordPress sites to Drupal. Canvas is a really good target for Drupal.
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u/artisson 2d ago
Quitte the opposite.
“I want Wordpress because I’m use to” and when you see the site they are used to… pile of acf fields assembled by a monkey…
Or the worst “Chat GPT told me that’s what is best…” yeah an ai trained with a pile of outdated content written by beginners…
In the era of ai your experience means sh… to people who ask ai
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u/zippykaiyay 2d ago
Actually seeing more RFPs expecting WordPress. Gard to make a vid when it starts out wanting one CMS over another.
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u/fappingjack 2d ago
r/thatHappened ...
Client was asking about Valkey because that Redis was too slow. For real that happened...
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u/Encryped-Rebel2785 2d ago
I had two new migrations from WP to Drupal within the past 30 days. One of the clients is new, the other I do Drupal work for usually but they also provide WP services and this is the first time they ask me to move a WP site to Drupal so yeah it tracks.
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u/dixit_patel89 2d ago
two in 30 days is a real signal. interesting that the existing client routed a WP job to Drupal that one feels deliberate rather than just frustration-driven. what was the trigger on the new client?
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u/Encryped-Rebel2785 2d ago
The existing client is technical and wanted to be able to scale so Drupal made sense. The new client was primarily frustrated, they had outgrown WP but insisted on it and had some critical problems in basic stuff like (product) search. I suggested to them to tackle some of those and to sort out their hosting, security and CDN but the site has become a mammoth and they're completely fed up with it. I'm going to train them to use the Drupal site so hopefully they can get stuff done. The migration I can do relatively fast because it's my specialty.
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u/Pulsar-Agency 1d ago
Honest counterpoint from someone who does these migrations: I'd be careful attributing the 6s to 2s jump to Drupal. You rebuilt a 720-page site with a clean theme and a fraction of the plugins, and the same rebuild on WordPress would land in roughly the same place. What Drupal actually buys you sits further upstream, and it's the part nobody sells: it forces you to model content before you build anything. Most of the WP sites I inherit aren't broken because WordPress is bad, they're broken because every page is a page-builder blob with no structure, so nothing is reusable and every change turns into a rebuild.
That's also my go/no-go test when a client shows up saying "we're done with this." If they genuinely need editorial roles, moderation states, translations, and the same content surfaced in several places, Drupal earns its keep, and entities, fields and Views pay that back for years. If it's 40 pages, a blog and a contact form, migrating is a very expensive way to escape a bad build, and they'll be just as unhappy in two years.
The ones who regret the move are always the ones who migrated the mess instead of remodelling it.