When a client came to us with 50,000 pages, five languages, and a content team of 30 editors spread across three time zones, the CMS choice became the most consequential decision of the entire project. WordPress was on the table. So was Contentful. We chose Drupal 11 — and six months in, we have no regrets.
The Problem With WordPress at Scale
WordPress is excellent for sites up to a few thousand pages with a small editorial team. But once you hit enterprise territory — granular permissions, complex content relationships, multilingual workflows, and high traffic — its architecture starts working against you. Plugins compound each other's debt. The permission system is coarse. And multisite, while possible, is brittle.
We've built dozens of WordPress sites and we love the platform. But for this client, it would have been the wrong tool.
What Drupal 11 Gets Right
Drupal's content architecture is fundamentally different. Everything is an entity. Relationships between content types are first-class citizens. The permission system is granular to the field level. And the multilingual stack — Language, Content Translation, Configuration Translation, Interface Translation — is the best in any open-source CMS, bar none.
For this project we created 14 content types, 6 vocabulary taxonomies, and a custom workflow module that routes content through a 4-stage editorial review before publish. None of this required a single line of WordPress-style plugin stacking.
Performance at Scale
With the Internal Page Cache, Dynamic Page Cache, and a Varnish layer in front, we are serving cached responses in under 50ms for anonymous users. The content team sees live previews through our decoupled preview setup — without affecting the production cache at all.
The Migration
We migrated from a legacy Sitecore installation using Drupal's Migrate API. 50,000 nodes, 200,000 media files, and 5 years of revision history — all moved cleanly over three weeks of parallel migration runs. The Migrate module's rollback-and-retry capability saved us twice when upstream data had encoding issues.
Lessons Learned
The biggest lesson: involve the content team early. Drupal's flexibility means you can build almost anything — and that means you need to resist building too much. Our first architecture had 22 content types. We cut it to 14 after two rounds of editorial workshops. Simpler is almost always better.
If you are evaluating CMS platforms for a complex, high-traffic, multilingual site — give Drupal 11 a serious look. The learning curve is real, but so are the rewards.
