Moving away from a platform you and your team know and are comfortable using isn’t easy. Recent events may motivate you to move away from WordPress, which I completely understand. I transitioned away from that platform years ago when it adopted Gutenberg. For me, there were few reasons left to endure the frustrations of using WordPress. While you can create beautiful, fast, and accessible websites that are relatively easy to manage for your clients, the drawbacks became too significant. I haven’t looked back since and it has been the best career move I ever made. There are a ton of platforms you can pick; I picked Statamic. Should you?
The state of WordPress
WordPress has developed a significant gap in technical knowledge among its users. It serves a wide range of individuals, from 'template monkeys' (or 'attic room artists,' as we might say in Dutch) to skilled freelancers and agencies that prioritize accessible and high-performing websites. WordPress serves them all. Marketers in Google’s privacy invading tool-of-the-year focused agencies, or your local teenage computer geek can click themselves a website together. Are those websites necessarily good? Probably not. They often lack the qualities that make a website great:
accessibility;
good design and typography;
good content;
usability;
performance;
editor experience;
and search engine optimisation.
Great websites require skill, knowledge and practice. You can certainly make great websites with WordPress, and a lot of people do; I’m not denying that. But having the skills required to make great websites, I firmly believe your time is better spent on a platform that aligns with those skills.
Statamic
I chose Statamic, which is a Laravel based app, as my preferred platform. Statamic is a developer-first content management system. It assumes you bring your own code. This means you need to be proficient in web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Additionally, because it is built on Laravel, you must be comfortable with more advanced tools such as Composer, Git, local development servers, and often web hosting.. Besides that it can adapt to your specific needs. Either use flat files or a database, use the static site generator or let your server generate HTML or use a headless setup. I’ve got my preferences, but there’s a lot ways to create a great website. And all of those are valid.
However, there are several things that Statamic does not offer. Unlike WordPress, it does not use themes. Instead, Statamic features Starter Kits, which are conceptually different from themes and are not interchangeable. They’re meant to be a starting point for your next project. Yes, you could use a fully designed starter kit, add some content and get a website going pretty quickly, but you still need to make sure you get Laravel running locally and on your server. This requires certain skills. If you’re willing to learn them, you definitely should. If you wish this stuff was easier, you might have picked the wrong platform.
I wish Statamic could…
Several topics that understandably often come up on the Statamic Discord community, often concern the fact that not everyone is a developer. Some of those discussion include:
if Statamic was easier to install…
if Statamic had a page builder like Elementor or Divi…
if Statamic had cloud hosting offered to take away the pain…
… Statamic could become a drop-in replacement for WordPress. Yes, if so then it could. However, it is important to understand that Statamic can replace WordPress, but primarily for users who bring their own code and are comfortable operating beyond the limitations of bulky page builders. It's not intended to be a Divi / Elementor replacement, and in my opinion this is a good thing.
Statamic has a clear developer focused experience. It’s a tool for developers that have (or want to learn) the above listed skills to make good websites. The goal shouldn’t be to become a WordPress replacement. If it were to switch it’s target audience from web developers, it would have serious implications for that current user base. It could fall into the trap of wanting to serve everyone and moving focus to area’s developers like me aren’t interested in (Gutenberg for example). In my opinion, Statamic's requirement for some technical knowledge is its strength. It's a platform for developers that know and want to bring their own accessible code.
If you want a no-code website platform, there are plenty of alternatives. Think of Ghost, Squarspace, Webflow or Wix. If you want to create bespoke websites however, then you'll always need to be able to write code. If you’re willing to learn and do just that, Statamic is the best platform you can choose, backed by a wonderful community I have the pleasure of being part of.
This piece is my personal opinion, but it contains some good points from my community friends Rias van der Veken and Ryan Mitchell.
Wanna learn?
There’s some great content out there:
Switching from WordPress to Statamic (The Statamic docs)
Learn Statamic with Jack (A video course on Laracasts by Statamic creator Jack McDade)
From WordPress to Statamic (YouTube channel from community member Michael LaRoy)
Statamic Tutorials (A video course by community member Jonas Siewertsen)
Heck, there is even some useful content on this blog. I also offer paid support, workshops or pair programming sessions.
Photo by Adrian Trinkaus on Unsplash.