What's the best CMS for my product?
EDIT: this is just the sales & info page for the product. The product lives on its own subdomain.
We're working out whether we want to stick with Webflow for our product website, or switch to Wordpress (or something else).
I'm trying to get my head around going beyond WP vs. Webflow and thinking about what's the right fit for our team, skillsets, and goals.
We need a significant update for our product page. It worked fine as a pitch site for investors and our Kickstarter. We're launching in May, so we want to have a real site with how-to articles, blog posts, and news.
High level, we have one team member who is familiar with Webflow. She's a marketer with some CSS/HTML skills and strong design chops.
The other team members (all non-technical) have familiarity with Wordpress because that's what we're using for our 10+ year old brand site. The back-end experience can be quite painful for simple tasks like adding an opt-in form or similar, but we at least know how to do it. We're using Beaver Builder as a theme.
Site speed and user experience performance is essentially the same with any of these options.
I know there are WP themes that are theoretically less painful, but is learning those easier than learning Webflow for our team?
I think you missed the most important part - what's your product? Is it a highly interactive application, a simple few page static website, or something else?
If I had to choose without knowing anything, [Extremely opinionated] I'd go with bubble > versoly > webflow > wordpress maybe. I rank WP low, because it's overly modular, i.e. all extensions (most if not all) work on their own, which makes it bloated very quickly (personal experience).
If I must do wordpress, I'd choose Elementor.
Thanks for the question. I just edited to add that this is the sales & info page for the product. I get ranking WP low. I've never used Bubble, so thanks for the suggestion.
Little biased but I would give https://versoly.com/ a go. We're a profit bootstrap startup.
I'm sure your marketer will love as we have a no-code UI but comes with a code editor for those who aren't scared to hop in and make a few changes.
WP is a huge pain. Page speed, flexibility, security, plugin issues.
In terms of Webflow it has a huge learning curve and every marketer I spoke to has not enjoyed using it. They usually leverage a template which comes with its own issues.
The CMS text editor is very weak, you will need custom JS for basic things like tables.
Thanks, and I appreciate you shooting your shot ;)
I'll take a look!
Look forward to your feedback and no matter what you chose would love to know why! Would help a lot.
If it's mainly for Landing pages etc. WordPress is fine. Just install Frost theme (free, very lightweight, nice and simple blocks, no need for any page block plugins.
Add Mailpoet plugin for newsletters and mailing lists, Yoast for SEO, Google Site kit for analytics, WP Fastest Cache for speed optimization, and you're ready to go in couple of hours. No monthly fees (only domain and hosting), no complicated third party plugins.
If you have a developer and want something faster and exacly-for-your-business try Statamic. No need for headless complications in 99% cases. Flat file CMS based on Laravel - unlimited flexibility and fast out of the box.
I think it comes down to the pace/types of changes you're making, your team's size and their skillset. If the team is large and you always have developers available Next.js/Gatsby and a headless CMS should work. If you're smaller or have no developers, then Webflow or something similar is probably a better choice.
It would be hard to convince me to use WP again at this point. Lack of familiarity with Webflow or something else will be short-term pain. The issues you mentioned with WP are probably permanent - I'd give the team time to learn/train and then move faster with the new tool.
I'd caveat that with one point - if training is needed or developers need to help you, think about what else you/they could be doing with that time. If those things are more valuable, do them first and maybe use WP for now.
Thanks for the cogent response. We have no web devs on staff, so Webflow looks like where we're at for now.
As mentioned by @code it would help to know what your website should do. If it's just a pretty functional website have a look at odoo. They are a Belgian open source ERP unicorn, and offer a decent website with chat, calendar, contact forms etc for free, custom domain included. As you grow you might also use (and then pay) their crm, payment, hr, inventory and dozens of other modules.
They area surprisingly little known alternative to squarespace, WIX etc
Wordpress has become too bloated now a days. Webflow is another pain to use. I have tried making apps using bubble, but that's again too much learning curve.
Webflow also provides headless CMS functionality, but integrating within webflow is also a painful task in my experience.
If you are thinking about CMS I would prefer to go with HeadLess CMSes like contentful, or strapi, and link it with GatsbyJS, or NextJS frontend app, I have found this flow much more simpler than learning to use no-code tools.
I've played with Contentful before and it was harder to use for non-technical folks for a CMS site.
The idea of headless CMS is great. But it creates a ton of extra work and maintenance for developers who should be working on product.