Do You Actually Need a CMS? How to Pick the Right One
A CMS (content management system) is the tool that lets you add, edit, and organize content on your website without writing code. WordPress is the most famous one, but there are dozens of options, and picking the wrong one can make your life miserable for years.
Let's walk through this in plain English.
The Three Main Options
Option 1: WordPress (and similar traditional platforms)
WordPress has been around forever and it powers about 43% of all websites on the internet. That's nearly half. If you've used the internet, you've visited WordPress sites without knowing it.
Good for people who need to publish content regularly and want to do it themselves. If you're running a blog, a news site, or a content-heavy business site, WordPress can work well.
The catch is that WordPress sites tend to slow down over time, especially if you add a lot of plugins. Security is also an ongoing concern because WordPress is such a big target for hackers. And if you want anything custom, you often end up fighting the platform instead of building on top of it.
Option 2: A headless CMS (Sanity, Contentful, and others)
A headless CMS is a newer approach where you write and organize your content in one place, and it gets pulled into your website (or app, or anything else) separately. The "headless" part means the CMS doesn't control how your site looks. It just stores and serves the content.
Good for businesses that want a modern, fast website with a clean editing experience. It's also great if you need your content to appear in multiple places (like a website and a mobile app).
The catch is that you need a developer to build the front end. You can't just pick a theme and be done with it. So the upfront cost is higher, but the result is usually a faster, more flexible site.
Option 3: No CMS at all
Sometimes the best option is keeping your content in simple files (like Markdown or just code) instead of a CMS. This is what we do with our own blog.
Good for sites where content doesn't change very often, or where the team is comfortable working with files and code. Developer portfolios, documentation sites, and small business sites with stable content all fall into this category.
The catch is obvious: if someone on your team who isn't technical needs to update the site regularly, this won't work for them.
A Quick Way to Decide
Ask yourself a few questions:
How often does content change? If you're publishing new content every week, you probably need a real CMS. If you update the site once a quarter, files in a folder might be fine.
Who's updating the content? If it's someone non-technical (a marketing person, an office manager), they need a CMS with a user-friendly editing interface. If it's a developer, they can work with anything.
What's your budget? WordPress is the cheapest to get started with. A headless CMS has higher initial costs but often lower long-term costs because the sites tend to be easier to maintain. No CMS is essentially free.
How fast does the site need to be? Sites without a traditional CMS tend to be faster because there's less going on behind the scenes. This matters both for user experience and for search engine rankings.
What We Usually Recommend
For most of the projects we work on, we lean toward either a headless CMS or file-based content paired with a fast, modern frontend. This gives our clients the best combination of speed, flexibility, and manageable costs.
But we've also built plenty of WordPress sites when the situation calls for it. There's no single right answer. It depends on your team, your content volume, and what you're trying to accomplish.
If you're not sure which direction to go, that's a great thing to sort out during a discovery call before any money changes hands.