It’s important to note the use-cases here. A lot of this discussion treats "CMS" as a single thing, but the requirements vary wildly depending on scale: one blogger versus a five-person marketing team versus hundreds of authors and contributors. Different arenas.
If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot.
But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem. How confident are you writing auth and password reset flows? How sure are you that the AI got it right? How solid is your approach to roles and permissions? Are you implementing 2FA? Supporting drafts, scheduled publishing, editorial workflows? Now you are also tech support writing the infrastructure as issues come in.
That's a very different scenario.
So please, if you're going to make sweeping statements on a CMS, please clarify if you're talking about a solo site owner situation or a multi-user setup.
> But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem. How confident are you writing auth and password reset flows? How sure are you that the AI got it right? How solid is your approach to roles and permissions? Are you implementing 2FA? Supporting drafts, scheduled publishing, editorial workflows? Now you are also tech support writing the infrastructure as issues come in.
And that's only the start of where it gets complicated
- Ingesting data from 3rd party systems
- Translating content to other languages
- Front end user auth and preferences
- Personalized content
- A/B testing
- Multiple sites in the same CMS, sharing the same content
The list of things that add on to make a cms (and the sites it is used to create) more complicated is enormous.
>If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot. But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem.
Is it? Django was just a personal project that started as a CMS for a newspaper. And that's pre-AI, and pre tons of libraries handling all kinds of functionalty like 2FA to offload features to.
And the core backend design and functionality for a CMS is a stable target that hasn't changed in 3 decades, unlike with other software.
> FTA: One that’s superior to the admin panel of WordPress or Drupal?
When you get to that multi person team, has any one asked them if they LIKE the CMS they are using? Because I assure you that they appreciate the functionality but it isnt a tool that any one is happy about using.
Usable and Usability are NOT the same thing, it is a lesson that was lost in the dot com bubble burst, that we might need to get back to.
I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to cloudflare or github pages. These sites cost 0 eur to run, and they always score better in all benchmarks compared to sites that are built on top of a separate CMS server.
I know WordPress is going nowehere and if there is some special backend functionality, that is needed. But 95% of web does not need it.
A static site is always cheaper, and the bottleneck has always been that editing code is indimidating. Therefore, AI actually resolves a big problem here, and this is going to alter the future of platforms like WP.
What do you use to edit texts on a dashboard or cms?
My wife needed a website. I’m not much of a frontend coder but I looked at the price of squarespace for a year and decided to go that route with AI.
Website is Astro. I easily update sophisticated designs with Claude or Gemini cli.
Hosted for free on cloudflare, it’s super fast. Any git update deploys to the website in a minute.
Got an hosted email form with astro action.
The only thing left is integrating a CMS. I was thinking of keystatic but it’s not compatible with Astro 6 yet. That’s the issue with vibe coding a stack you don’t know as much, without realizing it picked a version of astro that was so new that some tools didnt quite integrate with it yet.
Ditto. Almost all of my internal tools are built in the same fashion and deployed on cloudflare itself.
It is so much liberating to have no overload of CMS and the bloated code they come with.
NASA, White House, and which ever large organizations do not represent the most of the web.
When you have complexity, multiple non techincal users who need to update content, and frequent changes, a CMS is currently a very good solution. But thats just a small fraction of websites.
Most of websites are small, 1-2 person companies websites, non-profts, etc., that are basically business cards. Contact details, possibly a contact form, and few pictures. Thats it. There are likely at least hundred milloin websites like that, which are infrequently updated.
Majority of those sites are powered by WP and various site builders, which is far more complicated than what they need. There has not been good option for non-techincal users that makes it possible to make good looking and functional sites.
Also, please keep it civil. This is not Facebook. People can have different opinions.
What is always astounding to me is that people talk as if caching isn't a thing. It could hardly be easier to cache the html output from wordpress at either the webserver or CDN level, and it will perform just the same as any "static site" (of course, images, css etc will dictate how it performs once the browser receives the cached html)
You could do this with AI for at least the past decade. We saw lots of companies & frameworks spring up that targeted and did the ahrd work pushing this approach. That feels like the big change, with "using AI" to be an incremental gain here.
There is indeed not always a need for WordPress. I have been using ProcessWire (1) for over a decade. Open-source, zero dependencies, no-nonsense CMS — and when it comes time to build a new website, I go back to it even in 2026, because you make it once and it works for 10 years and counting.
Cloudflare is just jealous that most of their customers are actually running WordPress, but this is not something they will be able to solve with AI hype.
+1 for Processwire! I’ve mentioned it here a few times over the years and nobody seems to have ever heard of it! I’ve got a few sites well past 10 years now still happily chugging away on it! Basically zero issues with it, ever. It’s still my go to for all sorts of projects - installs in a few seconds, loads of really useful functionality out the box, easy API, beautifully flexible for all sorts of projects and a great community and ecosystem around it as well!
This looks extensible - how is the marketplace for finding people who can work on it? Wordpress is so common because it's so common you can always find someone to hack it together.
What constitutes a Wordpress Site? The 3 page hobby site or the 100th of pages of a large company?
There is a reason why Wordpress is (open source!) dominating the space ever since or more precisely, many niches.
To be honest, I had my fair share of "You might not need Wordpress" but in the end, nothing beats its versatility, its rights management and options. There is always a plugin for that.
I see no conntenter. Astro has its merits and use case - so have plenty of others (remember Hugo etc.?).
At a certain time you will hit a threshold or problems that are easy to solve using WP you usually disregard at the beginning.
I usually start out "No, WP isn't needed, just to regret it afterwards." There is a dilemma because customers only start to really utilize their website the moment it is setup. And it always went from "Just 5 pages" to "Can I add a marketplace?" to ballooning content as well as timed postings and social media integration.
I stopped questioning WP, because I really don't see alternatives in certain spaces.
Security is a concern, yes, but nevertheless, let's not talk about NodeJS in this regard.
Wordpress isn't a paradigm, it just works and while it seems to be some 20 years old odd code, quite many of the CMS in the React space struggled hard to getting to terms with the lastest paradigm shifts.
Wordpress is the reliable dude who looks boringly normal, but on the other hand never gets you into trouble.
So paraphrase IBM: No one gets fires for using WordPress.
And I would not say this about any other CMS. They are incredible hard, you have to get a lot of stuff right. But I won't implement my own CMS again. At a certain time everybody will come to this realization, most likely, when you have a deadline and miss out features that are hard to implement.
This is my opinion and I love playing and toying around with CMS ever since, even forums (phpBB?) or DIGG clones like Pligg back then. Great stuff, but I stick to WP.
I expect the bigger risk to dynamic database-backed CMS platforms right now is that AI assistance makes static site generator tools run against a version controlled repository of content less intimidating for most users... and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet) and much less likely to fall vulnerable to security problems.
I expect we'll see a further wave of CMS interfaces which provide a nicer editing experience on top of flat files stored in Git.
Maybe the strategic move for platforms like WordPress (and maybe Django too! The Django admin remains a very popular CMS platform) is to invest more in separation of admin editing from serving, such that there's an obvious path to edit your content in the CMS but deploy it as static files.
My own blog uses the Django admin and serves the site via Django (albeit behind a 15m Cloudflare cache to handle traffic spikes) but I have a scheduled GitHub Action that backs up the content to a Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup - it's not much of a stretch from that to having the Git repository feed content to a static site generator.
There's Tina CMS for editing files in Git, but honestly editing flat files is probably the least interesting or complicated part of an enterprise CMS, and IMO there's rarely a good reason to interact with files directly versus a database that publishes files.
I ran git-based blogs for years and have gone back to CMS. The instant preview and the instant publishing really make it a lot more pleasant to work with it. With Git, my read-eval-print loop so to say was a minute which is just too long. Fixing a typo then takes 2 minutes.
> and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet)
Is that really such a problem for the average Joe? I'm running multiple blogs via a Rust CMS [1] on the cheapest Hetzner server, and have had no problems with the scrapers or load or anything. Have also gotten to the HN front page without issues talking about that you shouldn't put a site behind Cloudflare since most don't need it [2]. Now of course, for businesses or something who depend on the service to be online, it's different. But I'm talking about regular Joe's blog here.
I had to add a Cloudflare CAPTCHA to my blog's search feature, but that's because I have faceted search which is a worst case scenario for bad crawlers.
Depends on the company level, on my line of business, what companies care about are headless CMS, with AI workflows, and oriented towards MACH.
Ah, and all of them have partnerships with Vercel, and possibly Netlify.
Sitecore, Contentful, Sanity, Storybrook,...
If anything, they killed the need for backend skills, you get a ready made SaaS, program interactions with AI, and if anything requires backend like logic, it is taken care by Vercel or Netlify functions.
I wouldn’t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier.
My perspective comes from enterprise: we use(d) a marketing agency to run two websites. A few months ago I discovered our team was spending 30+ minutes just to publish a blog post written by a product manager. Everything was built on Elementor blocks. Articles pasted from Word kept breaking styles. 20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.
With AI assistance, we migrated to Hugo in three days. 800+ pages. 15 reusable components. Zero plugin chaos. Permissions handled at the git level. A simple HTML form to upload images and paste articles for less technical people, most were fine with markdown already. GitHub Actions for cleanup, validation, and spellchecking. Attack surface minimized. Performance improved drastically.
I’ll stand behind this: most people don’t need a bloated CMS. They need clarity on what they want to achieve, a solid process, and software that turns that process into a system.
I never really understood the argument, you can design the frontend with AI anyway and then use WordPress as the CMS for clients. Clients want to be able to log in, update CPTs, edit a calendar, post pictures, things like that. Surely the idea isn't to vibe-code an admin panel/cms from scratch for every project?
For client projects I tend to go with KirbyCMS. Easy license, great functionality, very easy to setup and configure for the client side users. And way less bloated. I actually really dig it and nearly exclusively use it for my projects.
But other tools are great as well, like ProcessWire (named above).
I’m not sure that I buy all the points made. I can imagine an AI centric CMS where the technical interface (implement this site on MySQL, host it there, use Next.js, etc) is distinct from the content interface (change store hours) or even the design (change the background).
I have used Wordpress a lot (too much) and came to the view that for most websites it is just overkill. So I built https://harcstack.org and vowed to write all my new sites in actual code.
HTMX to the rescue since you can write server side code in a sensible way and still have quite a dymanic UX.
A CMS is for content authors, not developers. AI making it easier to build or re-platform sites doesn’t change the need for an admin UI that non-technical people can actually use, or the need for access control, governance, and approval workflows around how content gets changed.
If anything, I’d expect more CMS work to occur as the cost of building, migrating, and redesigning sites keeps dropping.
I agree with the sentiment against blindly jumping into the AI wagon from CMS, but the author seems mixing that from the migration from CMS into markdown content + static site generation.
To me the latter is a legit move and much cleaner architecture for most sites. And the issue of editing code, or really just markdown files, seems to be a solvable UI problem with good editors like Obsidian, or something similar but more tailored for website building.
I use AI as a full blown web master at this point. It maintains the site, functionality, etc. But I also make it track SEO performance, analytics. And I make it publish content. Sometimes that's based on a few bullets. Sometimes I submit my own drafts. I use guard rails and skills to ensure it all ends up the way I want. The management of the site is outsourced to the AI. And when I'm done it also makes sure the pull request merges cleanly and that the gh action to deploy (it creates that as well) does its thing.
Using a CMS is overkill if you have a static website generator. And once you have that it's just another code base that you can unleash agentic coding tools on. Most websites are pretty straightforward code bases to work with for AIs. The only real argument for a CMS always was providing an easy to use environment for people to work in without having to worry about technology. They power editorial processes too. But you don't need one any more if you can let AIs coordinate those processes. Use a word processor of your choice. Hand your draft off to the AI and let it do its thing.
Once you have this dialed in, which doesn't actually have to take a whole lot of time, you can get very efficient around content creation and management. Having good guard rails and investing in those is critical here and makes the difference between slop and having something that is actually informative and fresh. The guard rails can also deal with approval processes, fact checking, translations, audio transcriptions, check lists, tone/wording checks, etc. You can make this as complicated as you need to.
The same way coding agents don’t replace the need for an IDE, content generation needs to support arbitrary human-to-agent handoffs, where the human can say “this is the wrong direction, I sketched this change of what I want it to look like, see how it’s different and apply that pattern.”
And, in the broadest sense, that human interface is a CMS; the agent is just another editor, albeit one that happens to read and write raw data rather than using a WYSIWIG (or similar) editor.
But it needs a better headless capability. Most separate front ends appear to be grafted on relying on plugins. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
> Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town, and suggested the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS (he’s since migrated again to EmDash, which I talk about later)
That's a weird thing to read. (Not criticism for the author or the article)
> Migrated his personal blog
Is that a thing worth mentioning? I did that over a decade ago.
> Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town
I thought it's 2026 now, not early 2010s. People still do that?
> the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS
Yoast SEO is a huge paid plugin for Wordpress, so the founder not using Wordpress is at least moderately interesting, in a "cobbler buys shoes at walmart" kind of way.
I had no idea it was a product. I thought it was an SEO firm. That is a bit more interesting. But I also wouldn't be very surprised when a cobbler that makes work boots, buys sneakers from Walmart.
If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot.
But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem. How confident are you writing auth and password reset flows? How sure are you that the AI got it right? How solid is your approach to roles and permissions? Are you implementing 2FA? Supporting drafts, scheduled publishing, editorial workflows? Now you are also tech support writing the infrastructure as issues come in.
That's a very different scenario.
So please, if you're going to make sweeping statements on a CMS, please clarify if you're talking about a solo site owner situation or a multi-user setup.
And that's only the start of where it gets complicated
- Ingesting data from 3rd party systems
- Translating content to other languages
- Front end user auth and preferences
- Personalized content
- A/B testing
- Multiple sites in the same CMS, sharing the same content
The list of things that add on to make a cms (and the sites it is used to create) more complicated is enormous.
Is it? Django was just a personal project that started as a CMS for a newspaper. And that's pre-AI, and pre tons of libraries handling all kinds of functionalty like 2FA to offload features to.
And the core backend design and functionality for a CMS is a stable target that hasn't changed in 3 decades, unlike with other software.
But that is also not the only was to have impact.
Whatbindo think happens is that everybody already building things will reduce or entirely remove their reliance on other SaaS tools.
So retool and other support products are likely dead.
The people who used these products are already more than capable of rolling Auth.
All of this is spot on!
> FTA: One that’s superior to the admin panel of WordPress or Drupal?
When you get to that multi person team, has any one asked them if they LIKE the CMS they are using? Because I assure you that they appreciate the functionality but it isnt a tool that any one is happy about using.
Usable and Usability are NOT the same thing, it is a lesson that was lost in the dot com bubble burst, that we might need to get back to.
I know WordPress is going nowehere and if there is some special backend functionality, that is needed. But 95% of web does not need it.
A static site is always cheaper, and the bottleneck has always been that editing code is indimidating. Therefore, AI actually resolves a big problem here, and this is going to alter the future of platforms like WP.
My wife needed a website. I’m not much of a frontend coder but I looked at the price of squarespace for a year and decided to go that route with AI.
Website is Astro. I easily update sophisticated designs with Claude or Gemini cli.
Hosted for free on cloudflare, it’s super fast. Any git update deploys to the website in a minute.
Got an hosted email form with astro action.
The only thing left is integrating a CMS. I was thinking of keystatic but it’s not compatible with Astro 6 yet. That’s the issue with vibe coding a stack you don’t know as much, without realizing it picked a version of astro that was so new that some tools didnt quite integrate with it yet.
Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that.
> static site
There is no magic to that. You can make any Wordpress site basically static with one single plugin without losing any feature Wordpress provides.
There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there.
When you have complexity, multiple non techincal users who need to update content, and frequent changes, a CMS is currently a very good solution. But thats just a small fraction of websites.
Most of websites are small, 1-2 person companies websites, non-profts, etc., that are basically business cards. Contact details, possibly a contact form, and few pictures. Thats it. There are likely at least hundred milloin websites like that, which are infrequently updated.
Majority of those sites are powered by WP and various site builders, which is far more complicated than what they need. There has not been good option for non-techincal users that makes it possible to make good looking and functional sites.
Also, please keep it civil. This is not Facebook. People can have different opinions.
They're asserting you can do that stuff yourself now.
> There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there.
First, those are large orgs. Most WP sites are not that large or complicated.
Second, would those orgs use WP if they started fresh today? Or something like OP's setup?
Cloudflare is just jealous that most of their customers are actually running WordPress, but this is not something they will be able to solve with AI hype.
1. https://github.com/processwire/processwire
Great system as far as I am concerned - even if I tend to use KirbyCMS for most of my projects.
There is a reason why Wordpress is (open source!) dominating the space ever since or more precisely, many niches.
To be honest, I had my fair share of "You might not need Wordpress" but in the end, nothing beats its versatility, its rights management and options. There is always a plugin for that.
I see no conntenter. Astro has its merits and use case - so have plenty of others (remember Hugo etc.?).
At a certain time you will hit a threshold or problems that are easy to solve using WP you usually disregard at the beginning.
I usually start out "No, WP isn't needed, just to regret it afterwards." There is a dilemma because customers only start to really utilize their website the moment it is setup. And it always went from "Just 5 pages" to "Can I add a marketplace?" to ballooning content as well as timed postings and social media integration.
I stopped questioning WP, because I really don't see alternatives in certain spaces.
Security is a concern, yes, but nevertheless, let's not talk about NodeJS in this regard.
Wordpress isn't a paradigm, it just works and while it seems to be some 20 years old odd code, quite many of the CMS in the React space struggled hard to getting to terms with the lastest paradigm shifts.
Wordpress is the reliable dude who looks boringly normal, but on the other hand never gets you into trouble.
So paraphrase IBM: No one gets fires for using WordPress.
And I would not say this about any other CMS. They are incredible hard, you have to get a lot of stuff right. But I won't implement my own CMS again. At a certain time everybody will come to this realization, most likely, when you have a deadline and miss out features that are hard to implement.
This is my opinion and I love playing and toying around with CMS ever since, even forums (phpBB?) or DIGG clones like Pligg back then. Great stuff, but I stick to WP.
I expect we'll see a further wave of CMS interfaces which provide a nicer editing experience on top of flat files stored in Git.
Maybe the strategic move for platforms like WordPress (and maybe Django too! The Django admin remains a very popular CMS platform) is to invest more in separation of admin editing from serving, such that there's an obvious path to edit your content in the CMS but deploy it as static files.
My own blog uses the Django admin and serves the site via Django (albeit behind a 15m Cloudflare cache to handle traffic spikes) but I have a scheduled GitHub Action that backs up the content to a Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup - it's not much of a stretch from that to having the Git repository feed content to a static site generator.
Is that really such a problem for the average Joe? I'm running multiple blogs via a Rust CMS [1] on the cheapest Hetzner server, and have had no problems with the scrapers or load or anything. Have also gotten to the HN front page without issues talking about that you shouldn't put a site behind Cloudflare since most don't need it [2]. Now of course, for businesses or something who depend on the service to be online, it's different. But I'm talking about regular Joe's blog here.
[1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45965060
Ah, and all of them have partnerships with Vercel, and possibly Netlify.
Sitecore, Contentful, Sanity, Storybrook,...
If anything, they killed the need for backend skills, you get a ready made SaaS, program interactions with AI, and if anything requires backend like logic, it is taken care by Vercel or Netlify functions.
My perspective comes from enterprise: we use(d) a marketing agency to run two websites. A few months ago I discovered our team was spending 30+ minutes just to publish a blog post written by a product manager. Everything was built on Elementor blocks. Articles pasted from Word kept breaking styles. 20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.
With AI assistance, we migrated to Hugo in three days. 800+ pages. 15 reusable components. Zero plugin chaos. Permissions handled at the git level. A simple HTML form to upload images and paste articles for less technical people, most were fine with markdown already. GitHub Actions for cleanup, validation, and spellchecking. Attack surface minimized. Performance improved drastically.
I’ll stand behind this: most people don’t need a bloated CMS. They need clarity on what they want to achieve, a solid process, and software that turns that process into a system.
But other tools are great as well, like ProcessWire (named above).
I have used Wordpress a lot (too much) and came to the view that for most websites it is just overkill. So I built https://harcstack.org and vowed to write all my new sites in actual code.
HTMX to the rescue since you can write server side code in a sensible way and still have quite a dymanic UX.
If anything, I’d expect more CMS work to occur as the cost of building, migrating, and redesigning sites keeps dropping.
To me the latter is a legit move and much cleaner architecture for most sites. And the issue of editing code, or really just markdown files, seems to be a solvable UI problem with good editors like Obsidian, or something similar but more tailored for website building.
Using a CMS is overkill if you have a static website generator. And once you have that it's just another code base that you can unleash agentic coding tools on. Most websites are pretty straightforward code bases to work with for AIs. The only real argument for a CMS always was providing an easy to use environment for people to work in without having to worry about technology. They power editorial processes too. But you don't need one any more if you can let AIs coordinate those processes. Use a word processor of your choice. Hand your draft off to the AI and let it do its thing.
Once you have this dialed in, which doesn't actually have to take a whole lot of time, you can get very efficient around content creation and management. Having good guard rails and investing in those is critical here and makes the difference between slop and having something that is actually informative and fresh. The guard rails can also deal with approval processes, fact checking, translations, audio transcriptions, check lists, tone/wording checks, etc. You can make this as complicated as you need to.
And, in the broadest sense, that human interface is a CMS; the agent is just another editor, albeit one that happens to read and write raw data rather than using a WYSIWIG (or similar) editor.
Depending on who you talk to, they may not agree. (I am not in this camp but I am certainly aware of people who are.)
I made a thing [1] a few months ago because I wanted a lightweight expression of this.
[1] https://github.com/bootstrapital/flatcontent
Nice turn of a phrase! I was surprised it was a GoogleNope except for you, op.
But it needs a better headless capability. Most separate front ends appear to be grafted on relying on plugins. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
That's a weird thing to read. (Not criticism for the author or the article)
> Migrated his personal blog
Is that a thing worth mentioning? I did that over a decade ago.
> Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town
I thought it's 2026 now, not early 2010s. People still do that?
> the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS
Is it? People still haven't accepted this?
>wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro
>he’s since migrated again to EmDash
Do you need to know anything more about this guy? If that's one of the articles sources, I think you can ignore anything it says.
Is that a thing worth mentioning? I abandoned my personal blog a decade ago.
/s but only so slightly.