You may have seen the news surrounding WordPress lately. If you haven’t, WordPress has been at the centre of a media storm, causing confusion and concern amongst developers, as well as people who have sites built on WordPress.

In September, WordPress CEO, Matt Mullenweg, went after WP Engine (WPE), calling it a “cancer to WordPress”, accusing WPE of taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the WordPress platform. WordPress then sent cease and desist letters to WPE before banning it from accessing WordPress.com entirely. This move has left significant numbers of websites vulnerable to cyberattacks or left them completely unusable.

As a result of the issues with WordPress, we’ve been exploring some CMS alternatives. Here’s our top five:

Created in 2021, Payload was designed to showcase what can be done when using modern frameworks to build a CMS. Payload can be used for any type of website thanks to it’s easy to use application programming interface (API). It also integrates seamlessly with popular frameworks like Next.js, so it’s a good all-round solution. Here at Si digital, Payload empowers us to create beautiful websites that are fast, easy to manage and highly customisable. If you want to find out more about why we’ve moved to Payload, have a read of this Lab Note.

Advantages:

• It’s simple layout makes its easy to built new pages and navigate
• It’s very fast—creating new pages is rapid, a real time-saver
• Excellent SEO tools make it easy to use and its visual aides help you determine whether your SEO content is working to its full potential
• eCommerce product management means running your online store is simple
• Live previews, see the page you’re building as you build it
• Create your own forms directly in the CMS—really powerful
• Top-quality editorial tools make your content stand out

Disadvantages:

• It’s plugin ecosystem is quite small at the moment, and they have to be installed manually rather than through a user interface, meaning development time is required
• Due to its infancy there are some features which require plugins or modification, where other CMSs have these as native features

Released in 2001, Drupal is a developer-focused CMS known for its scalability and customisation capabilities. Drupal has an extensive library of plugins, making it a good option for large or complex websites. It can take time to master due to its complexity, but it allows for granular content management, user roles and internationalisation.

Advantages:

• Large plugin library
• Enterprise backing—Drupal is used by lots of government websites and non-profits
• Drupal offers out-of-the-box user and permission management tools, providing security from the get-go
• Large online community makes it easy to get support if you need it

Disadvantages:

• It’s a steep learning curve for both developers and users. Its complex CMS can be quite complicated in places
• Hosting can be expensive compared to other options
• Performance is slower than many alternatives

Craft CMS is similar to both Drupal and WordPress, but it’s much newer, so it has more modern features such as multiple post authors, in-editor live preview and headless support. It also features a fairly neutral user interface, meaning that you’ll feel right at home if you’re moving from other CMS’s. It’s built using PHP, just like WordPress and Drupal, meaning developers can get up to speed quickly and easily.

Advantages:

• Easy-to-use user interface makes it easy to pick up if you’re moving from another CMS
• Large plugin directory
• Extremely customisable fields make the CMS a breeze to use
• Easy localisation makes your website accessible anywhere in the world

Disadvantages:

• Not free for commercial use, creating an additional cost to your business
• Relies heavily on plugins for what would be considered standard features in other CMSs, such as forms and SEO
• Multiple users are only supported in paid versions

Contentful is a headless CMS, meaning your website and CMS are kept separate, rather than being kept together like the other CMSs we’ve looked at so far. Contentful is hosted in the cloud, so your content is highly available all over the globe.

Its headless CMS structure is ideal if you have a fully custom website. Decoupling the CMS and frontend offers countless benefits, including improved security, speed and flexibility. However, it does require a bit more work in the project build phase.

Advantages:

• Simple, easy to use user interface
• Fast, and globally available
• AI integration makes for easy content generation and automated routine tasks
• Highly customisable
• It's low maintenance thanks to its cloud-based hosting. Contentful manage and maintain the platform

Disadvantages:

• Contentful’s free tier is quite restrictive, which limits what you can achieve without paying
• Interface usability is dependant on how you chose to structure your data, so it can become messy without proper upfront planning
• Standalone CMS which requires an entirely separate frontend build

While MDX is not a CMS, it’s a different approach to managing website content. With MDX, you edit your content by editing files, like a Word or Notion document, making it a familiar and easy experience for editors to add or change content. MDX extends the functionality provided by Markdown, allowing the addition of custom blocks in and around content. It is also super fast and can be embedded directly into your Next.js project. MDX is best suited for technical marketing teams, developers and solo maintainer projects.

Advantages:

• Content loads very quickly
• Pages and posts are editable in a familiar document style, so it is quick and easy to update content
• Not reliant on a separate CMS stack, so less to maintain

Disadvantages:

• No user interface whatsoever—you can only edit a file
• If there’s an error in the file, the page won’t load on the frontend
• No user or permissions management

While PHP-based CMSs like WordPress and Drupal have become the go-to option, they are gradually being replaced by faster, lighter and more modern CMSs like Payload and Contentful. PHP based CMSs have shaped the way we build websites over the last 20 years, and have allowed marketeers to independently manage website content without having to continually turn to developers for basic updates. They’ve also allowed people to install themes to start building a site through a ‘full-site editor’ experience without the need to write any code. This is really useful for small companies and individuals, but often come at the cost of flexibility, customisation and site speed, all of which are vital for a website’s success.

On the flip-side, setting up a headless CMS will require technical ability, but in return you’ll have a flexible, fully-bespoke website with better security and quicker page load speeds. Our own website, and the website we’ve designed and built for Harwin are both built using Payload and Next.js. The speed of both the frontend and CMS for these sites is unmatched when compared to traditional CMS options.

If you’ve got an existing site that uses a traditional CMS, it might be a good time to start thinking moving across to something more modern. So get in touch if you’re ready to make the jump from WordPress to a new, drama-free CMS.