Every few months a prospect asks the same question. They have a small or mid-sized business, a five-figure budget, a content team of two or three people, and a brand-new requirement to launch a website that does not look like 2009. They have read enough blog posts to know the contenders are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. They want a real answer.
So here is one, based on the last twelve months of builds we have actually shipped.
WordPress: the default for a reason
WordPress runs more than a quarter of the public web. The market share by itself does not justify picking it. What does justify it, for small-business work, is the labour market around it.
If your team needs to hire a developer next year, you will find ten WordPress freelancers for every Drupal one in the same price band. If a key staffer leaves, replacing them is a posting on Upwork, not a six-week search. If your business grows and needs a second contractor, the second contractor can read the first one’s code without a two-week onboarding.
The cost of that labour market is something everyone says in 2017: WordPress is plugin soup. It is. If you let it become plugin soup. Most of the badly performing WordPress sites we audit got that way because someone installed thirty-eight plugins without asking what each one actually did. The platform does not require that.
For brochure sites, blogs, content marketing, simple e-commerce via WooCommerce, and any project where the editing team needs to be productive on day one — WordPress is the right call. Gutenberg shipped in trunk this November and the block editor is going to make that even more true through 2018.
Drupal: the case that still exists
Drupal 8 hit a stable release in late 2015 and Drupal 8.4 just dropped this October. It is a serious platform. It has a content modelling system that WordPress can only approximate with ACF and twenty plugins. It has multi-site, granular role-based access, taxonomy and entity reference handling that just works, and a hardened security track record.
The catch is the cost of getting there. A small-business Drupal build runs forty to a hundred percent more than the equivalent WordPress site. The pool of Drupal developers in any given metro is small enough that you will pay a premium for time even when you find someone. Module ecosystem decisions — Paragraphs versus Field Collection, Search API versus core search, Webform versus Contact — all need a real architect to settle.
If the project has a real reason to need Drupal — government, university, large editorial workflow with twenty contributors and a publishing pipeline, a multi-site portfolio of dozens of brands — the budget supports the platform choice. If it does not, you are paying for capability nobody is going to use.
Joomla: the third place
Joomla 3.8 shipped in September with a clean migration path to Joomla 4, which has been in alpha all year. The platform has not died. It has a real community, real extensions, real maintenance.
But the gap is widening. In the last year we have built more than thirty WordPress sites, four Drupal sites, and zero Joomla sites. The phone has not rung for it. The few prospects who do mention Joomla usually have a legacy site on it and are asking whether to migrate off.
For a fresh build in 2017, the only reason to pick Joomla over WordPress is if someone on the team already knows it and refuses to learn anything else. That is a real reason, but it is a people reason, not a technology one.
What actually decides it
The platform conversation is the wrong conversation for most small businesses. Here is the order of questions that should drive the choice.
- Who is editing this site, how often, and what is their tolerance for complexity? If the answer is ‘our marketing manager, twice a week, low’ — WordPress wins almost every time.
- What are you actually building? A content site? E-commerce? A members-only portal? An internal tool? Each one shifts the answer.
- What is the maintenance budget? An annual retainer of zero dollars and a hope that the site keeps running is a different platform conversation than a paid maintenance contract.
- What is the existing tech stack at the company? If there are already WordPress sites in the marketing department, adding another one halves the operational overhead.
For the typical SMB build we quote — a content site with light commerce, a marketing team of two or three, a budget under twenty thousand, and a three-year horizon — the answer is WordPress, every time, and the only argument left is which set of plugins to use.
The honest answer
If you have read this far hoping for a verdict that says Drupal or Joomla, the verdict is not there. In 2017, for almost every small business in the room, the right call is WordPress, built carefully, with a tight plugin shortlist and a custom theme rather than a marketplace pick. See how we approach SMB builds.
The cases where the answer flips — heavy editorial workflow, multi-site, regulated industry, deeply custom content modelling — they exist, but they are rare in this segment, and the projects that need them tend to know already.