Which platform is better than WordPress?
Okay, we’re biased for sure, but we think most businesses would benefit from looking at a developer-led platform like Wagtail, especially as they grow. When you just start out, going with a huge CMS like WordPress makes sense. They have templates and all the tools you need to get going. But, as you evolve, moving towards purpose-built solutions becomes almost compulsory.
Why is WordPress so popular?
If you’re not a dev or you don’t have access to one on the regular, WordPress is great. It has a massive plugin ecosystem and a large community with tons of support and documentation. That makes it quick to set up for small businesses, e-commerce stores and blogs.
How WordPress can let growing businesses down
What happens is that it gets bloated over time with plugin overload and maintenance nightmares that start to pile up. After a while, most sites that aren’t religiously maintained will suffer performance bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities due to mounting issues with the plugins and themes they’ve used. It’s also an older CMS that lacks a lot of the helpful modern development and content management workflows that newer platforms have.
Comparing Wagtail with WordPress
Wagtail is a Django-based, open-source CMS that developers, like us, love. With Wagtail, we get full control and a clean architecture. And it’s great for brands that need custom workflows, multilingual support and structured content. (See how it worked for Prindex.)
Let’s look at some of its features:
Content modeling
On WordPress, this is really limited unless you use more plugins (which opens up additional security risks). Wagtail is robust and customisable out of the box.
Security
Remember those plugin vulnerabilities above? That’s just day-to-day life with WordPress. You need to keep it patched. Wagtail has fewer dependencies and is enterprise-ready.
Developer-friendly
Looking out for ourselves here, we don’t overly love the PHP-based, plugin-centric nature of WordPress. With Wagtail being on Python/Django, it’s a lot more flexible and modern.
Performance
WordPress can and does degrade with scale. In contrast, Wagtail is optimised for performance, and the code is never bloated with things you don’t need.
Editorial UX
The WordPress UI is still pretty user-friendly, but it’s quite generic now. In contrast, StreamField offers slick and customised editorial tools, built for the modern brand.
Scalability
Sites on WordPress are a monolith, and usually have a lot of things bolted onto them. That’s hard to optimise in comparison with Wagtail, which is built for scale from the ground up.
Who should use Wagtail instead of WordPress?
For all these reasons and more, we would recommend Wagtail over WordPress for growing companies with custom content needs. So long as you have an in-house dev team or an agency partner like us, it’s a better, more robust and built-for-purpose solution. That makes it great for scale-ups and enterprises concerned with performance, compliance or editorial workflows. That’s probably why it’s used at NASA, Google, the NHS, Mozilla and more. Sure, it can cost a bit more in the beginning, but you’ll get a cleaner architecture and a more future-proof foundation for long-term growth.
So, which platform is better than WordPress? If you want to be a rocketship, we say Wagtail! However, no matter what platform you want to go with, we’re ready to help you make the most of all of its features.
