I'm curious what the popular sentiment on this question is. I don't have an answer I'm super sure of, personally.

I have been using WordPress for my personal works as well as clients since 7-8 years now. It has really evolved in terms of performance as well as ease of use with introduction to Block Editor & Themes.

But still to accomplish a complete solution out of it , you will require many plugins, widgets and adons. Thus making it heavy loaded and increase in response time.

I prefer Webflow and Framer as a great alternative to WordPress. Webflow & Framer gives you hassle free self hosted CMS you can use out of box.

The minimal interface & advanced tools, helps designers to create pixel perfect websites with dynamic data and even custom logic using flows.

But it's totally a preference of client. If flexible, I would go for Webflow.

There are hundreds of better tools out there. Every single one is better for some and worse for others. You have to find the right one for you. You can create your personal optimized WordPress Themen with everything inside you need. I dont get why people install for example bloated Slider plugins when you, can do it quite simple yourself.

ProcessWire indeed.
is a wonderful tool that executes in the same server requirements as Wordpress and it provides powerful features and is as old as Wordpress too!.

processwire.com/

WP is one of the most "popular" meaning most installed. His challenger is Joomla, less "popular" (less installed) but certainly to my opinion better.

Much robust (his code is clean and strong), a lot of native things like multilingual support, ACLs (users's rights and permissions), an administration interface natively responsive and accessible (for people having some difficulties),...

For me, and this is purely personal, joomla is far better.

launch.joomla.org/

Drupal. drupal.org/

Elanat CMS

Elanat CMS GitHub link

Elanat is a powerful CMS under .NET Core.

This is an amazing question! Despite WordPress (WP) being a robust system and considered the most user-friendly, there are many different content management systems (CMS) available. The company I used to work for used to advocate for WP as the go-to solution for blogs and content-based websites.

However, one of our clients came in with their own requirements:

• Frontend: NextJS (Page Router)
• CMS: Strapi

We didn't need a backend as Strapi provided REST APIs for the data. Since Strapi is open-source, it boasts numerous existing extended plugins. It offers a great user interface and is self-hostable, although they also offer a paid cloud version.

Working with Strapi made me realize that we can create cutting-edge websites while enjoying the convenience of a CMS for managing content.

In my company we take on a lot of clients WP sites, but internally when we create sites from scratch we use CraftCMS. It's free unless you want multiple users, but it's got a very robust templating language and the CMS is easy to use for devs and content writers.

It entirely depends on what you want to use it for, how frequently new content will be added, how much dynamic content is needed (e.g. E-commerce), who will be contributing it, and other questions.

• Personal blog with tech content?
  • Maybe a static site generator is enough -- I use Hugo and it's alright.
• Landing page or single page portfolio, but you don't want to host a static site or deal with HTML?
  • Carrd, Wix, Squarespace etc.
• Some interaction and integrations needed?
  • Build an app, or try no-code stacks like Webflow or Bubble + Airtable/Zapier/Make/Memberstack etc.
• CMS with ongoing articles and content written by nontechs?
  • Sure, maybe Wordpress. I'm seeing it a lot with small nonprofits where nontechnical volunteers are contributing to the sites, but the plugins are powerful and you can turn it into a shop or booking system etc too.

Nocode services have gotten pretty good, so you can add some e-commerce even to a static site with tools like Memberstack, Gumroad or Stripe. Site builders like Webflow and even the minimal single page Carrd give you integration helpers for many of them. I thought about building my latest startup idea in Webflow since its UI builder was quite nice and t has many CMS and DB+service integrations, but ended up using Elixir and Phoenix LiveViews instead. Really: it depends on what you want.

For WordPress type websites I would probably use Astro.JS

[deleted]

It looks like Hashnode is eating up all the tech blogs that used to be on Medium, and even starting to challenge Dev. Although the community here is amazing, the headless CMS and general awesomeness of Hashnode is so great for personal things with your own domain.

I'd use Ghost before I'd use Wordpress. It's cleaner and lighter and more modern. Whatever those terms mean to you.

I've used Wordpress in the past and am moving one of my older websites away from it as I think too many plugins ended up causing it to become super slow.

I'm currently using Ghost for my personal blog but I've been enjoying Dev.To for it's community much more.

Hugo

I was never hugely keen on Wordpress and then they changed a few years ago (probably longer than I think) to the blocks way of doing things and I lost the plot 😂
I currently use Hugo (gohugo.io) to create a static site. I really like it, but it definitely needs more tech knowledge than Wordpress...

Thanks, guys, for your options! I'll use Strapi in my next project, as I'd prefer to implement FE on my own

strapi is super.
it serves you as backoffice, Cms, apis for frontend and what not!

I have been used by WordPress over three years now. I used it to create a social networking app. Converted it to both android and iOS version. But is very slow and sometime hanging. Pls is there an alternative for it.

If you want to stay in the (modern) PHP world you should take a look at Statamic. Its a Laravel based CMS that has a huge range of third party extensions.

It's a very "it depends" question :)

Overall, I find WP an excellent CMS, if done right. Too many plugins, not understanding hooks, and using them in the wrong way, etc may lead to a slow website.

Also, very often converting WP to static might be a great solution and a one better than going headless.

Apart from WordPress, I can also recommend:

• Statamic - I even started a series of articles about it for WP developers - - I hope you don't mind the link. It's cool, Laravel-based, flat-file by default.
• CraftCMS - similar to Statamic but based on a different framework
• Frontmatter CMS - if you like markdown and using your Visual Code Studio
• Nuxt Studio - this is only for Nuxt, but I really love the experience

It all depends on your needs. There are so many CMS flavors that it's not a simple task to pick the perfect CMS.

I also have an article about this :D

You could try using Apostrophe CMS. It's a node-based CMS solution. Ref: v3.docs.apostrophecms.org/

If it's for yourself, it doesn't really matter, if you are comfortable with MDX or JSON, go for it. Maybe Sanity and Contentful can help with data management.

If it's for clients, you can consider a headless approach, where the WordPress install is just the backend, and the frontend is created using any tool that can read GraphQL/WP API.

Dozens of tutorials for Gatsby and NextJS show how to do this. The biggest advantage is that the end user doesn't need to re-learn a new CMS. He will publish everything on WP.