Wordpress Alternatives, popular CMS choices

WordPress users can quickly become aware of how many problems they will have to face in the lifetime of their WordPress-based website and how difficult it will become to maintain without serious investment in expert support. However, WordPress is not the only CMS system and there are others that may better fit your needs. Read on to see what they might be.

These tools offer a neat way to build a set of static files that form your website. There are usually 2 parts to it - the raw content, written for example in a popular Markdown format, and a theme, which usually contains a predefined layout of your page. The generator engine will produce the final HTML files of your website based on these 2 ingredients (and probably some additional configuration or code, as well). You will have to get somewhat technical with this solution, but you’ll be in control of how your page is built and what really happens with the content.

• Ghost
• Hugo
• Jekyll
• Gatsby

Classic, “headed” CMS

The classical, or “headed”, as opposed to headless CMSes are responsible for delivering the HTML code of your website upon every request from a user’s browser. There are 2 parts of the system - the user-facing part and the admin interface, which is where you will enter your content. The admin part can be pretty complex and will also allow you to install additional extensions, themes, etc. that will provide extra features to your CMS system. The main issues of these platforms are:

• complexity
• less-than-perfect security
• performance
• incompatibilities within the plugin ecosystem.

You’ll also end up choosing the hosting provider and their plan and worrying about platform updates if you want to keep your installation secure.

• WordPress
• Drupal (also comes with headless)
• Joomla

Headless

Last class of the CMS platforms are the headless systems. What they offer is often a completely abstract way of organizing and consuming your data. These systems do not care if you will be building a product catalog displayed on a website, inside a mobile app or on a flatscreen. Their goal is to provide a clean and easily accessible way of defining data models, authoring data and then fetching it. How you make use of that data - is completely up to you. That also means that the amount of work you’ll have to put in to use any of these systems as a backend for your website will be quite big, especially compared to the previously mentioned solutions.

• Flotiq
• Contentful
• CraftCMS
• GraphCMS

Conclusions

Depending on your level of technical expertise, the amount of time you want to invest or the plans you have for your digital properties - some of the solutions will be a better choice than others. Luckily - there are so many alternatives that we shouldn’t feel forced to use any single one. On the other hand - once you get on that train - it might be hard to switch to a different system, because many will try to lock you in. Choose wisely.