The best CMS for a business website

The question “what is the best CMS for a company website” has no universal answer, but it does have one reliable guide. The best one is the one the person who will actually fill it with content can work in, not the one that is nicest to program.

I will go through the four solutions I come across most often on custom company websites, and for each one say who it suits and where the catch is.

How to decide

Before you look at the names, answer five questions. The answers pick the platform almost by themselves:

• Who will write the content, marketing or your supplier?
• How often does the content change, once a year or every week?
• How many different content types does the site have: articles, products, locations, case studies?
• Does the site have to connect to a CRM, an ERP or another internal system?
• How much are you willing to pay to run it each month, maintenance included?

Webflow

A visual editor, a CMS with custom fields and hosting in one service. Marketing edits texts and images directly on the page and sees the result straight away. New pages can be assembled from components without a developer.

Suits company websites where marketing writes the content and where the site has to look exactly like the design. I went through the price of the individual plans in the article on Webflow pricing.

WordPress

The most widely used system in the world, an enormous choice of themes and plugins, and it is easy to find someone who knows it.

Suits companies that have been running on it for years, have their processes sorted and do not want to migrate.

The catch is maintenance. Every plugin is somebody else's code that has to be updated, and as the number of plugins grows, so does both the risk and the loading time. The comparison with Webflow is in the article Webflow vs WordPress.

Headless systems

Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok and others. The content is stored separately and the site pulls it in through an API. The same data can be used on the website, in an app and on a screen in a branch.

Suits situations where there is a lot of content, several people write it, or the website is not the only channel.

The catch is that the editor does not see the page, only a form with fields, and that somebody has to write the front end and maintain it long term. Without a developer you cannot add a new content type.

No CMS at all

A static site with the content in the code. The fastest and the cheapest to run.

Suits one-page presentations and campaign pages that do not change.

The catch is obvious: every change of a single word goes through a developer. On a site meant to live for years, that gets expensive.

A one-line summary

• Marketing writes the content and looks matter: Webflow.
• You are already on it and it works: WordPress.
• A lot of content or several channels: headless.
• One page that never changes: no CMS.

Whatever comes out of it, the rest of the decision is the same for everyone: speed, technical SEO and what you can change yourself after the handover. The list is in the article on web development standards.

How I choose the platform on actual projects is described on the custom web development page.