One of my WordPress sites, creativemedia.space, crashed multiple times over the past couple of weeks, so I have been looking into alternative solutions for the site, such as Webflow and Jekyll.
Goals & Requirements
Creativemedia.space is a content site mainly consisting of self-published lessons (written in a technical blog-style format) and curated sets of found online resources, the primary feature requirement is a taxonomy system (categories and tags).
The need for a CMS admin UI is low (I’m the only author at the moment, so I’m fine with editing flat markdown files via a local dev environment and a manual build/deploy workflow), but it would be nice if this site were able to scale to include collaborators in the future, so a CMS interface is probably the next priority, and something simple like Netlify CMS should suffice.
Tests
- Jekyll Test #1
- Webflow Test #1
Notes
- Possible tech stack:
- Static Site Generator (e.g. Jekyll or Gatsby)
- Simple CMS (e.g. Netlify CMS)
- Flat files? Pages and posts as markdown files?
- Free Hosting at Netlify?
- Staging server via GH pages (if we go with Jekyll)?
- Webflow is super cool, but would need to look into hosting with custom domain (?)
- For taxonomies like categories and tags, they have a solution (although I forget what they are called—still need to test this)
Brief Backstory
For 10+ years, I’ve been working with WordPress for personal and client sites with very few problems, but for some reason my CMS site has been nothing but trouble ever since I upgraded to WP 5+ and php 7+ earlier this summer. My other sites upgraded fine and have been working smoothly, but for some reason this site keeps crashing. I’ve spent way too many hours on the phone with tech support and I’ve migrated, reinstalled, and rebuilt the site from scratch too many times (e.g. ran tests on different servers, different directories, and even different hosts) and have yet to identify the source of the problem.
Other than that, my only other issue with WordPress is performance. Static sites are so fast in comparison. With that said, another possible option that I am considering—a middle one—is testing out a headless-cms setup with WordPress as the CMS and using either WP’s rest API or a GraphQL plugin to work with any number of front-end setups (e.g. Gatsby). This makes sense, although I am hesitant to do so because the main problem that I keep running into is WP crashing randomly during a post or page update. In other words, if I went the headless CMS route, I am hesitant to use WP for fear of it crashing again. My latest thoughts are hell, if I am going to separate my concerns and build a new frontend from scratch, I might as well do the same on the backend. Along these lines, I might look into other CMS options (e.g. Sanity, Contentful, Forestry, Dato, etc.).
Need more time. 🙂
Stay tuned for more…