Best CMS for a simple website?

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turtleattacks

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#284141 2-Apr-2021 22:34

Hi guys,

I've been building the wife's business website in HTML5 and we are thinking about upgrading it to a proper CMS.

What would be the best CMS for a website that only has about 10 separate pages but would need to be able to inject JS code for booking pages?

I've heard good things about Hugo but not sure if it's flexible enough for customising the page and not sure if we can inject a JS in the page.

Also quite like the 'fanciness' of a subscription based CMS like Squarespace/Wix but not keen on the idea of paying them $20 or so per month for the rest of our lives.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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mrdrifter

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#2685902 2-Apr-2021 22:50

I've worked with Umbraco in the past and from what I've seen and heard recently it makes a good CMS for small through to large scale sites.

timmmay

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#2685922 3-Apr-2021 06:02

Wordpress has grown from a blog platform to a fairly good CMS, and runs 40% of the internet, which makes it a pretty good bet. I've run about five Wordpress sites for a decade, first on shared hosting(bad) then later on AWS EC2 instance (good but more work). If you go Wordpress I suggest business grade hosting such as WPEngine, which starts at US$25 per month. Their platform and support is beyond excellent in my experience.

Wordpress requires some upgrades and maintenance, and sometimes things go wrong that mean you have to spend a bunch of time on it. For example the Wordpress instance of the business my wife works for is taking 10 seconds to load pages after it hasn't been hit for 30 minutes. The infrastructure people don't know what the cause is, the web developer doesn't know what the cause is, I haven't looked but could probably solve it but that is just an example. You also have to be careful of permissions as one bad plugin can have the website taken over - though in ten years of running five Wordpress sites that hasn't happened to me.

SquareSpace does cost money, but it's simple, includes hosting and a CDN, and support. It's a simple, worry free option. I've recommended the small-ish busines (10 people) my wife works for moves to it.

Dolts

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#2685930 3-Apr-2021 08:35

I'm a fan of Hugo with https://www.netlify.com/ or https://pages.cloudflare.com/

There are a few static site CMS - https://jamstack.org/headless-cms/

https://www.netlifycms.org/ and https://forestry.io/ seem to be popular.

No need for monolithic approach for small sites these days and this approach would cost $0/month until you needed to scale to a paid plan for one of the services.

timmmay

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#2685943 3-Apr-2021 09:31

Static site generator is a good idea. Better for performance and security.

jpoc

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#2687550 6-Apr-2021 20:48

joomla?

Dynamic

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#2687652 7-Apr-2021 08:45

CMS like WordPress etc need maintenance. Updates for plugins etc are important, and in my experience most client sites that are compromised are based on a CMS like WordPress. They are fantastic systems, but many people make the mistake of thinking they are set and forget. Are you going to do this for her? Back up the site so it can be restored if it is compromised? Regularly, or maybe once or twice and then forget?

Paying a subscription to someone like Wix basically hands off the maintenance and security to them. There is merit in this for Kiwi small business web sites.

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timmmay

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#2687717 7-Apr-2021 10:09

Agree that managed services are best for many. I have a cron job running my Wordpress core and plugin updates nightly using Wordpress CLI as having Wordpress being able to update itself opens a security hole, but setting the script up is beyond most people.

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Behodar

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#2687865 7-Apr-2021 13:26

mrdrifter: I've worked with Umbraco in the past and from what I've seen and heard recently it makes a good CMS for small through to large scale sites.

I use Umbraco myself, but it's probably more expensive than some of the other options given its hosting requirements.

Groucho

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#2687929 7-Apr-2021 16:31

Joomla is my go to CMS. It's about the same age as Wordpress, open sourced, also well supported and much more intuitive based on my own and client experiences having used both. As timmmay alluded to with Wordpress, Joomla (and whatever third party extensions) also needs frequent updating.

IMO Joomla and most other CMS's are probably less of a hacker's target because Wordpress is so dominant online so it gets picked on more often. If you have access to your host account's log files you'll probably find a bunch of 404 errors to /wp-admin or other /wp- paths looking for a Wordpress backend or potentially vulnerable plugins.

turtleattacks

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#2688060 7-Apr-2021 21:30

Thanks guys, with all things considered, and that I don't want to teach the wife on how to use git. I've opted for Zyro.com

Think I paid $90USD for four years and the site looks great.

Only thing about it is that I think the speed is a bit slow, and that I can't inject custom javascript code (i.e. book forms).

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mattwnz

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#2688074 8-Apr-2021 00:25

One of the big problems with CMS's is the loading speed. Loading speed these days is very important.

Wordpress is usually the go to CMS. Wordpress isn't the best. Then there are more simple CMSs like Weebly and WIX which are pretty good and they do the backend CMS updates. But I would also suggest looking at google site, and blogger. Blooger which you can get templates for turning iti into more ofa website, and it is actually are pretty good CMS which you don't need to worry about updating it apart from the template. As blogger is owned by goolgle it seems to load fast.