In our first article in this series, we explained the high-level differences between a headless CMS like Butter and a traditional CMS like WordPress. Now we can take a look at a more concrete example of a typical project journey.
Let’s say you’ve got an existing website built using a modern tech stack like React, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, etc and you want to add a blog to it. You’ll have very different experiences doing this with a traditional CMS than you will with a headless CMS. Below, we’ll see how.
Let’s go through what this project will look like if you use WordPress and your site is built on Rails.
First, you’ll need to decide whether you want to self-host or not. Since this example scenario involves you already having a website and you want to add a blog to it, then you’re likely going to have to self-host WordPress. Initially your costs for hosting may be low, but as your site gains more traffic, the costs will increase. Additionally, self-hosting means you are responsible for keeping current with WordPress updates and also for backing up your data.
Once you’ve gotten basic WordPress installed, it comes with a default theme that you’re going to want to change so that your blog matches the look and feel of your existing website. This means either buying a theme that is close to what you want and hacking it apart or starting from scratch and building it from the ground up. Both paths involve your developers cracking open the WordPress source code and navigating the WordPress template + theme systems.
A simplified process of building a theme to match your existing brand will likely involve the following:
Plugins are an integral part of WordPress. There are a lot of them. For example, here’s a WordPress link to its most popular plugins. As you can see, for everything that you want to add to your blog, you’ll need to find the right plugin.
Let’s just take a simple example and say you wanted to be able to have a contact form, a way to screen for spam in your comments, add Google analytics (we’ll talk more about analytics later), and have eCommerce capability on your blog to sell your product.
You’ll need to find, install, customize, and configure any plugins you want to add.
For these capabilities you’ll be adding four plugins:
Out of the box, these plugins may not quite fit with your existing site design. If that’s the case, you’ll need to go into the config / source code to make changes so that everything blends seamlessly.
You may also want additional plugins for social sharing (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and SEO (Yoast), which will also require some configuration.
With the level of customization you’ll likely need with a WordPress-powered blog, it’s important to keep in mind that customization isn’t the only change developers will be considering. Remember, there’s already an existing website built in modern technology. The engineering team has a set of tools and processes to develop and deploy this primary site. By adding a traditional CMS like WordPress to the fold, engineers now also have to think about:
Your engineers aren’t the only ones who will be affected by a WordPress integration. From a marketing standpoint, here are a few key things your team will need to consider:
Once your engineers and marketing team are on board and have done all the legwork to add a WordPress-powered blog to your site, there are a few considerations that remain on the horizon:
Now that we’ve peered under the hood of a WordPress-powered blog, let’s take a look at what your project would look like using ButterCMS assuming we have an existing Ruby on Rails website.
First, you’ll need to set up a ButterCMS account. You can do this for free.
Then run the Rails Generator to create URLs, application code, and Rails templates. Note that these templates live in your existing website’s codebase. Butter is a headless CMS, it doesn’t control the look and feel of your blog, your website controls that. Butter simply provides the raw content via a Content API.
Here’s a 60 second video showing the entire process:
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Butter provides your content editors the same easy-to-use experience as WordPress.
Butter also provides built-in SEO, scheduling capability, and more. No plugins to install and hassle with.
Now let’s look at the same engineering considerations we did with WordPress and see how they look when using Butter.
You deploy it the same way you deploy in your current process. ButterCMS melts into your existing tech stack. Your deploy process stays exactly the same.
It doesn’t.
Assuming your existing app uses source control (and you are, right? ;) ), source control automatically happens since the code to integrate with Butter’s API lives in your existing application.
Same as the rest, this part is easy, as it’s part of your app so your app controls the URL’s. Butter was designed to make achieving your blog at www.yoursite.com/blog dead simple.
Your marketing team will also have questions, but Butter makes the transition to its CMS smooth.
Butter allows you to directly manage metadata and SEO in the pre-existing templates so you can add tags, descriptions, metadata, and other information with ease. Butter’s transparency makes it easy to see exactly what you’re doing.
No. Existing tags in your main website layout carry over to your blog automatically. Also, if your main website or app has login capabilities and user accounts, you don’t need to worry about integrating analytics across everything. People viewing your blog will be authenticated with your existing user accounts database since the blog and site are all part of the same app.
So far, we’ve walked you through the typical product journey when using two solutions: a traditional CMS like WordPress and a headless CMS like Butter. There are three key areas where you can see significant differences between these two solutions:
A traditional CMS is a massive piece of software. WordPress has over 1.5 million lines of code. WordPress comes predefined, with tightly coupled templates, logic, and database. You start with everything -- often more than you need -- and then you customize and hack it to mold it to your needs.
ButterCMS is the opposite. You start with a clean slate and build up. Instead of hacking the guts and actual source code of the CMS, you use Butter’s content modeling to create exactly what you need. It was built for that purpose, with no assumptions or limitations for the kinds of content you want to manage.
A traditional CMS requires you to download and host and maintain yourself. As an alternative, you can pay a professional WordPress service to do this for you.
ButterCMS is delivered as an API-driven service, and has nothing for you to host or maintain. Butter hosts the data, the CMS dashboard, and API platform. You simply query our API to pull your content into your application.
A traditional CMS is separate from your existing site or app. Any changes you make (branding, etc.) will need to be made twice: on your existing site and within WordPress. Additionally, any login/user info you have on your main site will differ from that of WordPress, which has its own user and authentication system.
ButterCMS slides into your existing site or app. Changes to your main site will be reflected in your CMS. And you don’t need to worry about login for your blog: people viewing your blog will be authenticated with your existing user accounts database.
Unless you have developers who have the time and know-how to work fluidly with a traditional CMS like WordPress, there is an unavoidable time-sink involved with using a traditional CMS that requires you to get under the hood to really customize your blog. A headless CMS like Butter means a shorter project timeline and a lighter burden on your developers and marketing team.
As we discussed earlier, getting WordPress to look and behave the way you want it to look and behave will involve a great deal of customization (i.e. developer) work. This time spent customizing WordPress is time your developers could be working on more important core problems that will drive revenue. Looked at this way, WordPress is a cost-sink. But this isn’t the way most people think of WordPress. Why? Well, there are several WordPress fallacies that obscure the true costs of using WordPress as your CMS. In this section, we’ll explore the WordPress fallacies and learn how ButterCMS is a better solution for your CMS needs.
The first WordPress fallacy goes something like this: “Themes and plugins allow me, the marketer, to do everything I need to do to set up CMS. I don’t need a developer at all.”
This fallacy is based on a mistaken premise: that a marketer can, with a few simple clicks, choose a theme, add some plugins, and voila - a functional blog that fits into the existing website and behaves precisely how you want it to behave. In practice, this simply isn’t true.
You’ll always need a developer to customize WordPress, fix plugins, and do other work to ensure that your WordPress site behaves exactly as you want it to behave.
Since you’ll need a developer no matter what, this leads to a number of other questions:
The answer to all of these questions is that a headless CMS is likely your optimal solution. It means your developers can work with a tech stack they already love, meaning they’ll be more satisfied and efficient. Developers are less likely to push back when they are working with something they already love, and the marketing team will have an easier time working with happy developers. And developer time saved is a huge benefit from a cost perspective.
Give your Marketing team a CMS they'll love without using WordPress.
The reason ButterCMS exists is because the WordPress architecture isn’t optimal for every scenario. In fact, it’s suboptimal for scenarios where you want full control over the presentation layer (i.e. design of your website) and deep integration with your existing tech stack. In other words, once you have a need beyond hosting a simple WordPress install and purchasing an off-the-shelf WordPress theme, you enter into a scenario where diving into the guts of WordPress becomes required.
One of the biggest draws of WordPress is that it’s free. But is it really?
The short, WordPress sales pitch answer is, “yes.” It’s not a lie: you can get the files you need to set up WordPress and run it -- on a basic level -- for free. However, when you are using WordPress in any way other than a very simple blogging tool with minimal to no customization, the total cost of ownership is significantly more than $0.00.
As we’ve already discussed, developer time is a significant cost if you want to customize WordPress to match your existing site. Some simple math will tell you the approximate cost of having a developer (even a freelance developer) dive into WordPress to customize it for you by ripping out the parts you don’t need, fixing buggy plugins, etc. If it takes three full weeks (a conservative estimate) to customize your WordPress blog, take those 120 hours and multiply it by the developer’s rate. Suddenly you’re looking at thousands of dollars just to get your WordPress site to play nice with your existing site.
On top of that, there are other “hidden costs” associated with WordPress once you step outside the off-the-shelf templates and basic hosting. This article does a great job of shining a light on some of those hidden costs which include, but are not limited to:
Most critically, WordPress’s “free” model doesn’t take into account the most invaluable resource you have: time. Software is only really free if you don’t value your time.
Below we’ll be reviewing in-depth some of the problems with WordPress and how a headless CMS solves these problems.
When an off-the-shelf template and basic plugins aren’t going to make your blog look and behave the way you need it to look and behave, some of the problems of WordPress become more obvious.
A complaint that developers often raise about WordPress is that it’s bloated. They aren’t wrong. WordPress has been around for 15 years and has amassed over 1.5 million lines of code. Its themes have additional thousands of lines of code. And it isn’t just the sheer amount of code your developers have to work through if you stick with WordPress. The bloated nature of WordPress means that it can be slow.
When discussing WordPress with ButterCMS, many customers have concerns about WordPress’s speed: “We've historically used WordPress REST/JSON APIs (with the front-end disabled) for the comfort of our writers but are finding it is having significant impact on page load times because the API is slow, isn't really customizable and we are limited in the ways we can query it.”
WordPress is open source software, which means it is especially vulnerable to hostile attacks. It’s certainly possible to do everything you can to protect your WordPress site from malware or hacking, but it requires a significant investment of time and resources to do so. As an example, here’s a 2018 guide to keeping WordPress secure (warning: it’s long). Failure to keep WordPress updated can open up your site to significant security vulnerabilities that can create real costs (developer time spent dealing with the security breach, paying ransomware, losing business while the site is down).
Give your Marketing team a CMS they'll love without using WordPress.
Puns aside, ButterCMS was created to be a better solution for your CMS needs. Butter is a professional, scalable platform that allows you to smoothly integrate CMS into your existing tech stack in a matter of minutes. Butter handles the infrastructure side of things so you aren’t wading through a DevOps nightmare when your site starts to grow. Butter also offers professional support, including 24/7 chat support, integration help, and more.
Additionally, you don’t have to worry about the hidden costs of WordPress with Butter. Here’s how Butter compares on the hidden costs of WordPress:
|
WordPress Hidden Cost |
ButterCMS |
|
Domain registration |
No cost - use your existing domain |
|
Hosting |
No cost - nothing to host |
|
Premium themes |
No cost - Butter doesn’t require them |
|
Premium plugins |
No cost - Butter doesn’t require them |
|
Security services |
Butter secures the CMS platform, saving you time and headaches |
|
Storage and Backups |
Butter handles all of it for you, freeing up developer time |
And by saving you time and the opportunity costs that come with time spent customizing and worrying about WordPress, Butter offers you peace of mind and the opportunity to do more interesting and profitable things.
At this point, Butter might seem like the right ingredient for your website. But how do you get started with Butter? We’ve laid out a few scenarios depending on where you are.
If you don’t have an existing WordPress site, you can give Butter a try for free here. You can get setup in minutes and start publishing content.
Butter can help you transition from WordPress to ButterCMS with no switching costs. You’ll just need to follow a few simple steps:
You can also make the switch to Butter from other CMS systems out there. If you’re using something like HubSpot or Medium, the switch to Butter is just as easy. Send us your export file and we’ll handle the rest.
Butter was built to make developers lives easier. By extension, using Butter instead of a traditional CMS like WordPress will save your team time, headaches, and money. WordPress has been around for 15 years at this point, and while it is often the default CMS for businesses and individuals, it may not be the right fit for you. Butter is a modern approach to CMS and will save you from having to churn through customization and security headaches.
