What I want from a CMS in 2019

WordPress is no longer the default. This sentence would have been controversial five years ago. It is not controversial now, but a lot of small-studio briefs are still being written as if it were.

A short tour of what the studio is actually using, what it has stopped using, and what it is watching.

Craft CMS is the studio’s default for any client that has more than one editor and a real content workflow. The matrix field, which lets editors compose pages from a defined set of components, is the single feature that has made this the default. Editors get the structure designers want them to use. Designers can ship pages that hold up to non-designers editing them.

Kirby for clients with one editor and a small site. Flat-file. No database. Faster to set up than Craft. Less suitable for large content models.

Statamic as the alternative to Craft for teams that want flat files with a Craft-like authoring experience. Works well. Used it on three projects. Would happily use it again.

Sanity, Contentful, and the headless CMS category, for projects where the front end is a static site or a single-page app and the content model is shared across multiple consumers. Genuinely good products. Not the default for a typical small-business site, where they are usually overkill.

Eleventy for sites that do not need a CMS at all. Static. File-based. No backend. Most personal sites, and many small-business sites, would do better here than in any of the above. The studio’s own site, when it next gets rebuilt, is going to live here.

WordPress is still in use, on legacy projects. The studio is no longer recommending it for new work. The plugin ecosystem, which used to be its strength, is now the source of most of the security and performance problems on its sites. Gutenberg has improved the editing experience but not enough to bring it back as the default.

Webflow for clients who need to update the site without a developer and who have not yet outgrown the CMS limits Webflow imposes. Increasingly, the answer for small marketing sites where the budget will not stretch to a custom build.

Squarespace for clients whose budget is below the level at which Webflow becomes worth setting up. Not a recommendation, but not a refusal either.

The pattern, across all of these: the right CMS is the one whose constraints match the team that will be running it. Most small-business sites do not need WordPress. Many of them do need a CMS. The default has moved to flat-file or component-based systems, and the work coming out of those systems is, in my experience, calmer and easier to maintain.

The studios still defaulting to WordPress are doing so out of habit. The studios that have moved on tend not to go back.