Is Anyone Using any CMS Other Than WordPress? How is Your Experience?

Deepak K
Is anyone using any Content Management System (cms) other than WordPress? How is your experience?
I've recently seen many people talking about WordPress sites being comparatively slow.
I, myself, use WordPress for all my websites, but I wonder if there is any cms that is easier to learn and can do everything that WordPress does.
Please share your experiences with other cms.
4 👍🏽 4
[filtered from 84 💬🗨]

👈📰

is anyone using any cms other than wordpress how is your experience

🔗🏹

💬🗨

Dennis Hemmen
In my experience, WordPress is not slow by itself but choice of bloated plugins and themes (like Divi, wpbakery, Elementor) and large images make it slow and that gives WordPress the "slow" reputation.
WordPress is accessible for everyone. But the ease of building and installing plugins does not always mean that people make the right choices and don't need webdesign knowledge. That's why you see so many slow sites.
If you use for example oxygen builder on a WordPress site, maybe in combination with a caching plugin like Wprocket. You can build lightning fast(under second) loading sites.
_{💟👍🏽13}

Michael Hu
Yes this is correct. You can test how fast WordPress is by using a quality host and the default WordPress theme and you will find that it loads almost instantly. The slowness increases with third party software & large images
Deepak K
Same page design using Oxygen and Custom Coded: Which will be faster?
Dennis Hemmen
That depends on how well you code 🙂
Of course you can't go any more lightweight then coding only what you need. But there won't be a big and noticeable difference. (depending on your design)
But don't get all focused on pagespeed. There is not much point in optimizing any more if your pages load within 1, 1,5 seconds.
Deepak K
Agreed! Thanks a lot for sharing.

Alex Carpenter
First WordPress sites can be fast if you take the proper steps – most WordPress sites aren't fast because most WordPress sites are built by people that aren't actually web developers.
Second I hate everything about WordPress. The security, the technical debt, the third party plugins, the ridiculous code bloat, the way the plugins have so many resource calls, the whole dev and maintenance process in general. I only build on WP if I absolutely have to.
I build the majority of my sites on Craft cms, which is fantastic. Umbraco is also fantastic, but it is a .net platform that requires windows hosting unless you use their cloud hosting that is only available in Denmark at the moment. Both of these are blank code cms and do every single thing better than WordPress other than education, barrier to entry, plugin availability, time to market, and universality. If you build on these you really don't need to worry about security, but you do have to custom design every site and have at least some level of development skills. The modularity and native features of both are fantastic and content management is significantly better. Both are very easy to learn – if you know how to code.
If you aren't at that skill level and are a designer then probably webflow. The design process on webflow is really good – the code is kind of trash – it doesn't delete the code as you delete the elements that require it (which through the build process can add up) – at least it didn't last time I used it, but DIY WP is also usually trash and it takes a lot of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to slow down a site. The main speed problems I encounter with Webflow sites are people not appropriately scaling their images and using too many videos.
If you aren't a developer or a designer then I have heard really good things about Duda. It would probably be your best bet for speed without spending any extra time optimizing. But it is DIY so you may have limitations if you do any kind of custom work.
None of these will be able to have full functionality and implementations without more work though. Webflow/Duda just won't be able to do some things. Craft/Umbraco can do anything a website can do – but the plugin markets are smaller so there won't be as many prebuilt solutions for more complex functionality.

Leigh Davidson » Alex
Did you ever use Expression Engine?
Alex Carpenter » Leigh Davidson
No, I was using Adobe Business Catalyst pretty exclusively in those days. I hear they are fairly similar and Craft is basically an upgraded Expression Engine, but I could be wrong about that.
Alex Carpenter » Leigh Davidson
Why?
Leigh Davidson » Alex
I have a person that wants to rebuild my site on EE.
Alex Carpenter » Leigh Davidson
Ah. It is good, but it is old. They are losing their market share pretty fast: – https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/ExpressionEngine
I would also say do a quick Google search of Craft cms vs Expression Engine and read through a few articles to see what you find. It seems like at this point it is somewhat a legacy system and they may be stuck in their ways. I could be wrong, but it may be worthwhile to explore other options.
TRENDS.BUILTWITH.COM
ExpressionEngine Usage Statistics
Alex Carpenter » Leigh Davidson
I don't give too much credibility to market share but when it is declining like that is usually means they aren't keeping up with modern technology to a degree that the people that develop on it are willing to go through the pain and time to learn something else.
Leigh Davidson » Alex
Agree.

Kerwin Co
WordPress website is fast very fast just don't go overboard bloating the website with too much plugins you don't need.
I don't understand why people blame WordPress itself when the problem is they install just about any plugin they can think off then complain its slow.
Going back to the topic of other cms if you want to self host WordPress is good if you don't want to host it yourself and let others deal with it Webflow is a good one. Just don't expect the same flexibility as to what WordPress has.

👈📰

🔗🏹

Michael Mason
We use Joomla. And we also use a dedicated server so sub 3 second page load on mobile is normal but for optimization Joomla kicks the crap out of WP as it doesn't need any plugins to optimise and rank.
_{🤭👍🏽🤯4}

Deepak K
And, it does everything what WordPress does, right?
Will give it a try.
Michael Mason
For me it does everything WP does and more.
As a programmer I prefer Joomla because if I need to I can edit the code quite easily.

Igor Mateski
Wp isn't "slow". Only poorly developed sites with little technical j ow how are slow. Bu that's more down to the developer, not the platform.
We've taken websites that load for 30 seconds on a dedicated hosting down to 3 seconds on a shared hosting environment over and over again for years now.
These client sites were clunky, slow, unsecured and ranked poorly. Our rebuilds usually result in 15-20% ranking boost within a month after launch.
So, WordPress is great. You just need to dig bit deeper and spend some time in optimizing the building blocks.
_{💟👍🏽10}

Deepak K
I didn't mean that WordPress is very slow.
Think of it like this:
If the same page design is created using WordPress and using any other cms then will there be any difference in the performance?
Igor Mateski » Deepak K
It will depend on HOW it's built, the page, and the website in general.
As Mike above hints, working with Gutenberg blocks you can make whatever you want, and add any styling you want. Basically, the text editor from before is now a default page builder.
Or you can still use the page builder plugins like Divi or Visual Composer, and build any design you want and do a proper build that will load fast.
You can screw up on page-level by using versized images and then leave the browser to push heavy images and also rely on it for in-browser resizing. This is among the most common screw-ups folks do.
Then, on a site-level, you can screw up by not eliminating JS loading of all sorts of plugins, starting from CF7 which loads always even if the page isn't a Contact page, to an entire band of javascript(Js)s from say Woo or a membership plugin, that again load everywhere even if it's a content-only page.
Then, local caching. Then, Content Delivery Network (CDN). Then, poor server choice. Then, poor registrar choice and slow DNS response times.
For speed of deployment, WP would be a nobrainer for most situations. I'd put my money that IN GENERAL, Drupal sites will be faster than WP sites on average. But that's not because Drupal is faster. It's geekier, and folks that use it tend to be technically literate, whereas WP because of its ease of use, doesn't demand higher technical skills to put together a website. And because you get everybody and their dog to put the "I'm a WebDev Too" badge, you end up with a mixed bag of terrible sites and spectacular sites, all built on WP.
Just like everything else in life, there's no clear winner in X vs. Y. Dig a bit deeper, and the answer will always be "It depends".
Hope this makes sense.
Mike Stewart » Igor Mateski
We host so we know what's up. All these non Devs who don't get static, bloat crap, and and can't cache need to back away from the servers! 😂
Igor Mateski » Mike Stewart
Yeah… if only folks would listen. The scariest kind is folks who j ow enough to be a hazard to themselves and clients.
_💟1
Mike Stewart » Igor Mateski
You don't need to be a designer stage.rise.st26dev.com to make things work
STAGE.RISE.ST26DEV.COM
Rise Local SEO | Dallas SEO Websites – Local Business Marketing
Igor Mateski » Mike Stewart
This your site? Nimble little animal. Loads nicely. Font sizes seem a bit needy for attention. Eg. the font size in the 5 services boxes seem too small, and the paragraph size in the next section seems a bit too large. And line height… 150% font size seems to be a good rule of thumb for legibility.
How are local businesses reacting to your pitch of being a one-stop-shop for digital marketing? I'm in the same boat, but a consultant I work with says you gotta zoom in and be great at one or two things. I'm pushing back as I still think that most businesses need general practioners that understand how marketing segments interlock vs working with subject matter experts who don't see past their area of expertise, and then it's the client's unhappy role to integrate everything.

Dan Sylvester
WordPress + oxygen + Lightspeed server. Security wise, I'm using Google Auth on my login page, WordPress natively isn't slow its the bloat we add on top of it.
CraftCMS is something I've tried its fast, but you'll need to learn learn twig.

Deepak K
Agreed!
But if the same page is created using Oxygen + WordPress and using any other cms then will there be any difference in the performance.
Dan Sylvester » Deepak K
One of the biggest issues I've had with Craftcms was the lack of resource documents compared to a more popular cms like WP or Drupal. Are you sure it's the cms? When I switched to lightspeed and Digitalocean the difference in performance was huge for me.

👈📰