Top 7 Websites Using Drupal
Drupal, the enterprise-level open-source content management system that powers 7% of all CMS websites, was launched 15 years ago by Dutch students. Today the Drupal community offers over 16 k plugins and design themes enabling companies to build reliable and highly scalable websites. Here’s my list of the biggest and most famous websites that use Drupal.
Top 7 Drupal websites
· Tesla. The California-based electric car manufacturing company was co-founded by Elon Musk in mid-2003 and has sold over 180 thousand vehicles so far. The company’s mission is to create a cutting edge and totally affordable electric car — and it looks like they’ve applied the philosophy to website development, too. Their Drupal website uses minimalistic interfaces, provides high-quality content (including infographics and videos) and is integrated with Shopify. The CMS also powers Tesla mobile app and (reportedly) the built-in vehicle dashboard;
· Greenpeace Greenwire. Greenpeace is the largest environmental organization that does not accept government or corporate donations. The community is funded by almost 3 million individuals — and more volunteers join the initiative on a daily basis. As a result, Greenpeace handles thousands of user requests. Before they decided to overhaul their website strategy, they’d often failed to respond to their audience, so many awesome ideas (and energy!) got wasted. The community turned to Drupal to create “the best open-source social platform…and save the planet” — and it looks like the goal has been achieved. The new Greenwire platform brings Greenpeace volunteers closer. It supports multiple user roles, enables editors to quickly add new regions and content, is synchronized with the Greenpeace website through a custom API and allows users to create small social groups within the global community. The platform now incorporates over 16 regional websites and has 20 thousand active members;
· The Economist. The Economist newspaper was first published in 1843 — and has been a trendsetter ever since. Once the company realized the community could no longer cope with the growing amount of data, they decided to launch a mobile app to distribute news content on a daily basis taking into account users’ interests and preferences. The Economist built two Espresso apps (iOS and Android) with a Drupal backend. The platform enables editors to publish five stories every day, automates content approval and excludes weekends/public holidays from the publishing schedule. The Espresso apps got over 300 thousand downloads in just 4 weeks and were met with rave reviews from the Economist lovers;
· Red Hat. In 2016 Red Hat became the first open-source software company to generate $ 2 billion in revenues. The company’s success can be largely attributed to their decision to use Drupal for the opensource.com website. The website supports the growing community of visitors and contributors, segments content into several categories (including business, government and education) and — thanks to Drupal extensive customization options — delivers unique user experience across these channels. Red Hat also collects customer feedback and leverages the data for further improvements;
· Virgin. A couple of years ago the British multi-billion corporation decided to revamp its website. Virgin creates new content (including videos, articles and podcasts) every day. As a result, their website lists thousands of pages and is growing non-stop. They needed a reliable CMS that would ensure smooth website performance and offer multiple customization options. Virgin considered several open-source content management systems and opted for Drupal. The company’s joint digital marketing efforts (including website upgrade, high-quality content and storytelling) resulted in a stable revenue growth (over $ 20 billion in 2016);
· Tourism Fiji. Every year Fiji’s tropical rainforests, sand beaches, coconut plantations and friendly locals draw over 700 thousand tourists from all over the world. Tourism Fiji made an attempt to connect thousands of websites advertising diving, tropical weddings and holiday home rentals and create a mobile-friendly portal that would showcase the country’s enormous tourism potential. Tourism Fiji chose Drupal and…won big. The new website organizes content in a logical way, provides full information on the country’s tour operators (who self-manage their pages) and offers multiple video and image galleries to inspire visitors’ passion to see the world. The decision to go Drupal helped Fiji Tourism increase website traffic by almost 700%;
· CARE UK. Cooperative Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE for short) is one of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations which works in 90 countries, supports over 800 projects and reaches out to 72 million people around the globe. According to Lloyd’s 2015 survey, 58% of charity boards reported having little to none digital skills. Like most charities out there, CARE UK was struggling to adapt to the digital age. They wanted to merge their two non-mobile websites, improve content discoverability and increase the effectiveness of their fundraising campaigns. CARE turned to Drupal to create a responsive website with a clear content organization and enhanced its functionality through custom extensions (internal ad banners, convenient registration forms). The new website has become a template for other CARE International divisions and helped the charity boost traffic and mobile presence by 67% and 53%, respectively.
Drupal is currently used by over 1 million organizations and entrepreneurs. The CMS is perfect for a company web site, online store, social or content-sharing community. Compared to Joomla and WordPress, Drupal has only one drawback: it’s a bit too technical for users with no coding experience. However, you can always address a reliable vendor who will put up a website, customize it using the available plugins or write a custom extension to achieve the desired functionality. The world’s biggest companies use Drupal; why not follow their example?
