How to Create a Website in Drupal
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With one in 10 enterprise websites running on Drupal, it is the open-source content management system (CMS) at the core of world-class digital experiences. It is fast, secure, reliable, and built to scale as technology changes, making it a strong choice for businesses that want to set the tone for digital experience today and tomorrow. Organizations including NASA, Pfizer, Tesla, and the Australian Government all rely on Drupal for mission-critical websites.
You might be thinking that all sounds great, but that must make Drupal tough to use, right? Not so much. And, to prove it, I am going to take you through how to create a website with Drupal step by step.
Is Drupal Right for Your Project?
Before diving into the tutorial, it is worth a quick reality check on where Drupal fits.
Is Drupal free or paid? Drupal itself is free and open-source. There are no licensing fees to download, use, or modify it. Your costs come from hosting, development, and any premium modules or support you choose, not from the software.
Is Drupal the same as WordPress? No. Both are open-source content management systems, but they suit different needs. WordPress is known for its gentle learning curve and is a strong fit for blogs and simpler sites. Drupal trades some of that simplicity for greater power: stronger security, more granular permissions, superior multilingual support, and a flexible content architecture built for complex, structured content.
Is Drupal easy to learn? It depends on what you are doing. Day-to-day content editing is approachable, and site builders can accomplish a lot through the admin interface without writing code, as this guide demonstrates. Advanced customization, custom module development, and complex theming do require developer expertise.
What are the disadvantages of Drupal? The honest trade-off is complexity. Drupal's flexibility means more decisions up front and, for ambitious projects, more developer resources than a lighter platform would need. Ongoing maintenance also matters: you will want a plan for keeping core and contributed modules up to date. For teams with the right support, that complexity converts into control and scalability. For a very small brochure site, a simpler CMS may be enough.
If you need structured content, serious governance, multilingual reach, or enterprise scale, Drupal is very likely the right choice.
Drupal Basics: Nodes, Entities, and Content Types
A little vocabulary makes the rest of this guide much easier to follow.
In Drupal, almost everything is an entity — a structured piece of data. The most common entity is the node, which represents an individual piece of content such as a page or an article. Each node belongs to a content type, which defines the fields that content has. A "Basic page" content type might have a title and body, while an "Article" content type adds an image and tags.
This structure is what makes Drupal so flexible: you define content types that match your information, then build pages, menus, and listings from that structured content.
Choose Drupal Hosting
Before we get started, it is important to take a moment to talk about hosting. Proper hosting ensures the world sees your Drupal website and that it operates reliably. For an enterprise organization running a vast digital ecosystem, keeping that technological infrastructure sound is essential. A few key considerations in choosing a Drupal hosting provider or on-premise self-hosting are:
- Performance and speed
- Security and compliance
- Uptime and availability
- Support and maintenance
Acquia's fully managed Drupal hosting gives your organization the power to create, control, and publish digital experiences from a single platform. It is optimized for Drupal and managed by us, so we will handle the technical infrastructure in the background, giving you more time to build head-turning content.
But, first, let us get Drupal onto your machine.
Install Drupal
There are lots of ways to go about installing Drupal, but we recommend following the steps laid down by the Drupal community.
If you are building locally before deploying, pre-configured local development tools like DDEV or Lando are worth a look. They spin up a complete, containerized Drupal environment with the right software stack already assembled, which saves considerable setup time. Many teams also install Drush, Drupal's command-line tool, to run installations, clear caches, and manage the site from the terminal.
The community documentation runs through the installation procedures for different operating systems, installation preferences, and required software stacks. In short, you will run a few commands and then open your browser to an initial Drupal installation page that looks like this:
Here, you will choose a language and an initial Drupal profile, then Drupal will install core modules and prompt you to configure your site: name your website, create an admin user, and apply regional time settings.
Once you are done here, continue to your installed Drupal site.
Set Up User Accounts and Add Roles
Once Drupal is installed and you complete the steps from the previous section, it will take you to your website's main page with a welcome message and tips on getting started:
Before getting into building the site itself, there is a little housekeeping to do. You are the admin user, so a few back-end navigation shortcuts now will save you time later while building the site.
Let us add the Admin Toolbar module to give the toolbar drop-down menus more administrative options. You can add the Admin Toolbar via the command line or by downloading the module files from the project page on Drupal's module search page. We recommend installing modules with Composer, especially when modules have dependencies. Once you have done that, click "Extend" in the admin menu at the top of the page and select the Admin Toolbar module to activate it. You can also use Drupal's module search page to explore any modules you might want to add to your site.
From there, it is good to set up some governance: additional roles and permissions so team members can access and edit the site according to their responsibilities. You can add users, roles, and permissions by clicking on the People tab in the toolbar.
This section covers a lot of ground, but here is the short version: add users, granularly select what they can and cannot do (down to the smallest edits), and build customized roles with tailored editorial permissions.
Create Your Homepage
Now that you've got your basic housekeeping out of the way, let's build a homepage. By now you might've noticed the ongoing example is for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. To create a homepage, we'll start by clicking into the Content tab and selecting "Add content."
There you will see content type options listed, and we are going to select "Basic page." You will enter a page editor where you will be able to give the page a title and some body text.
An important part of creating a homepage is the URL alias in the sidebar. In this example, I simply set it as "/home" (forward slash required). Once you save the page, that URL alias plays a key role in making this page the homepage. A fun module that demonstrates Drupal's extensibility is the Pathauto module, which, once installed, automates URL aliases for each page you create. That is just one example of the thousands of modules that can extend Drupal in nearly any direction, but I digress.
Upon saving your homepage, click the Configuration dropdown in the admin toolbar, select "System," then "Basic site settings" to enter your /home URL path as the front page.
Once that is saved, it will become your default homepage. You can, of course, edit this as you see fit.
Organize Content With Taxonomy
As your site grows, you'll want a way to categorize content, and this is one of Drupal's real strengths. Taxonomy is Drupal's system for classifying content. A vocabulary is a set of categories, and the individual entries within it are terms.
For our Hogwarts site, you might create a "House" vocabulary containing the terms Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. You can then add a taxonomy field to your Article content type so every article gets tagged with a house.
To set this up, click "Structure" in the admin toolbar, then "Taxonomy," and add a vocabulary and its terms. Once articles are tagged, Drupal automatically generates listing pages for each term, so visitors can browse all content in a category. Building your taxonomy thoughtfully early on pays off enormously as your content library expands.
Manage the Site Menu
Here's where you set up the menu that allows end users to navigate your website. Let's put it together. In the admin toolbar, select "Structure" and click into "Menus." There are a few default menus, but we're looking for the Main navigation menu, on which we'll click "Edit."
Recall the homepage URL alias "/home." For the sake of this site menu example, I created four more pages and corresponding URL aliases that we will add to our navigation menu:
- Gryffindor House — /gryffindor
- Slytherin House — /slytherin
- Hufflepuff House — /hufflepuff
- Ravenclaw House — /ravenclaw
When editing the main navigation menu, you add each menu item individually. The "Add link" button leads you to this page, where you will add the menu link title and link path. In this example, I have added the Gryffindor House page to the navigation menu via the URL alias "/gryffindor."
Repeat this process with whatever you want on the main navigation menu, and voila! You now have a navigation menu that looks something like this:
Each of these navigation links will take you to the respective pages. This is a basic example of navigation menu functionality, but, with some exploring, you can do tons to tailor your site’s navigation to your user experience needs.
Each of these navigation links will take you to the respective pages. You can also nest sub-items beneath a parent link to create drop-down menus, and reorder everything with a simple drag-and-drop interface. This is a basic example of navigation menu functionality, but, with some exploring, you can do tons to tailor your site's navigation to your user experience needs.
Add Modules
We touched on the Admin Toolbar module earlier, but let's look a little deeper. After initial Drupal core installation, adding modules allows you to extend and customize the capabilities of your Drupal website beyond what it comes with. With more than 50,000 contributed modules available to choose from, you can tailor your module selection to closely match your website's goals.
On the admin toolbar, click "Extend" to view a complete list of your Drupal site's active and inactive modules. From there, you can install, uninstall, and add new modules. If a module isn't serving you, you can disable it here just as easily. We briefly mentioned Drupal module search. When you download a new module from that page, you'll be able to upload it from the Extend menu when you click "Add new module." When we mentioned Composer being the recommended way of installing modules, it's really helpful here because the module will be automatically added to the Extend listing, forgoing the previous step altogether!
The world is your oyster when it comes to module selection, but it's important to know exactly what your site goals are and not to overload your site with extraneous or redundant modules.
Change Themes
Where modules extend site functionality, themes allow you to change the appearance of both the front end and back end of your Drupal website. From the Drupal themes search page, you can look for a front-end theme that fits your organization's aesthetic from a user point of view and a back-end editor experience to make things sleek for your content editors.
Click "Appearance" in the admin toolbar to add new themes, check for theme updates, and edit global, front-end, and back-end theme settings.
Leverage Blocks
Blocks are smaller bits of content that can be stacked together to build a page feature. In the Structure dropdown in the admin toolbar, click into "Block layout." You'll see the block structure of your Drupal website. It looks like this:
From that menu, you have the power to rearrange blocks, add new ones, and build custom ones. Let's do some cleaning. Remember the menu navigation and how it has a search bar? I want a cleaner navigation menu, so I'm going to remove the Search form block by clicking "Remove" under the "Configure" button:
Once I remove that block and refresh the page, the search form is gone and the menu looks a lot cleaner. Blocks empower you to build your website to look and function exactly the way you want. Add, remove, edit, and rearrange blocks and you'll find no shortage of unique ways to present your Drupal website.
Build Content
You've already seen an example of building content when we put together our homepage. Additional content types are available via different modules, depending on what you want your site to display. For the sake of practice, let's create a History of House Gryffindor article. Clicking into the Content tab in the admin toolbar, we'll add an article:
Add the title, image, body content, and URL alias that fits with the page, and save it. Using the instructions from the navigation section, you can put this where you think it would fit best. In this case, it'd make a nice sub-option in the menu under Gryffindor House.
Opening that sub-option would bring you to a separate page that talks about the history of that particular house. Rinse and repeat with any subsequent content you want to create.
Going Further With Layout Builder and Paragraphs
Basic pages and articles will carry you a long way, but modern Drupal offers more flexible, component-based page building.
Layout Builder is a core module that gives you a visual, drag-and-drop canvas for designing page layouts. You can add sections, split them into columns, and place blocks or fields exactly where you want them, either for one specific page or as a default layout for an entire content type.
Paragraphs is a popular contributed module that lets you build pages from reusable content components. Instead of one large body field, editors assemble a page from pre-configured pieces like a text block, an image gallery, or a call-to-action. It's a favorite among site builders who want to give content teams flexibility without letting page designs drift off-brand.
Both are well worth exploring once you're comfortable with the basics.
Maintenance
As with any technology – CMS or otherwise – keeping ahead of updates and regular maintenance is crucial to keeping your website performing optimally. In the admin toolbar, the Reports dropdown menu allows you to view a full-rounded Drupal site health check. You can view what modules and themes need to be updated, the status of Drupal core updates, and a myriad of other maintenance checks.
Of course, being a part of and following updates from the Drupal community is a wonderful way to stay in the know on all things Drupal. You'll be part of an extensive, diverse community of like-minded folks who have made it their goal to continuously make Drupal better every day.
How to Keep Learning Drupal
This guide is a starting point. To go deeper, the official documentation on Drupal.org is the definitive reference, covering everything from site building to custom development. Drupalize.Me offers structured video training and learning paths for both site builders and developers. And the Drupal community itself – through forums, Slack channels, and DrupalCon events – is one of the most welcoming places to ask questions as your project grows.
Getting Started
Alright, it's your turn! Hopefully, this step-by-step Drupal tutorial gave you a taste of what you can do with Drupal and helped show that it's far from difficult to use. But, let's take it a step further. Drupal's extensibility is what makes it such an attractive option for many of the world's leading businesses. And we want you to have what they have.
Humble brag here, but Acquia is the number one Drupal contributor on the planet, so we like to think we know what we're talking about.
Drop us a line and we can help start your Drupal project or kick your existing one up a notch! You can learn more about Drupal here, or, even better, get in touch and we'll show how to make your digital experience dreams a Drupal reality.
