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5 Reasons to Build Your Website With Wagtail (Not Wordpress)

22 Jul, 2022

Josh Hopton-Stewart

Wagtail
As a brand and web agency, we are frequently approached by businesses wanting a new, fresh, and functional website.

Unsurprisingly, many of these enquiries are initially for a Wordpress website, which makes sense! Wordpress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems out there, powering 34% of all websites on the internet.

However, just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s the right solution. Many CMSs (Wordpress included) were created in the early days of the internet and, while they were groundbreaking for their day, have gradually become bloated, outdated and full of security issues over time.

What is a CMS?

A CMS, or Content Management System, is the interface you use to manage content, pages and basic settings of your website. Think about when you want to post a new blog article, or upload a new photo to your image gallery; your CMS is what you’re using to do that. There are many CMSs out there, and while they all might sound like the same thing, they can vary greatly in their flexibility and user experience, from simple and intuitive to a web admin’s worst nightmare! 

Screenshot of Wagtail's website homepage

A screenshot of Wagtail’s website homepage.

What is Wagtail?

Wagtail is a modern CMS that addresses many of the common issues experienced by previous CMSs.

One major issue with most older Content Management Systems is that they don’t have a clear separation between a developer and administrator. This sucks for business owners because it means they have to navigate complex menus to find what they’re looking for and often have some level of coding knowledge to implement changes. Similarly, this experience sucks for developers as they wrestle against the limitations of an outdated and bloated system. Wagtail fixes these issues by providing a clear distinction between the different roles so the system is geared towards what people do best.

Wagtail is also built on top of a popular Python framework called Django. This provides a library of code which developers can use to speed up development, meaning lower costs and faster turnaround time! This framework is not only popular, but is respected enough to be the foundation on which large sites such as Instagram, Spotify and the New York Times are built.

Here are five reasons why we build our websites on Wagtail and why you should too!


#1. Wagtail websites are easy to maintain

Python codebases, on which Wagtail is built, are well known for being easy to read and understand. This is partly due to Python having a much more clear philosophy and guidelines than other languages such as PHP. A codebase that is easy to read and understand is easy to change, update and extend.

PHP, which is used for Wordpress, has a long history of evolving in an unstructured way, meaning that - unlike Python - there is no standard code formatting and many different ways to accomplish the same tasks. This often leads to a codebase that is difficult for your web developers to read, maintain or extend. Technical debt often becomes a major problem.

Many Wordpress developers don’t bother with best practices, such as version control and maintaining a staging or testing server because the architecture of Wordpress makes it relatively difficult. This is largely due to the configuration and data being stored together in the database. Best practice is for only data to be stored in the database, which Python follows.

BATS Theatre website by Obvious Brand Partners

Mockups of the BATS Theatre website built on Wagtail by Obvious Brand Partners.

#2. Wagtail websites are easier to keep secure

Python has a culture which finds an ideal balance between fast-moving innovation and diligent caution.

Heroku

A general philosophy of Python is “there should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it.” This means that development best practices are better promoted and easier to follow than with PHP.

Wordpress sites make extensive use of plugins (third party code) to provide often trivial functionality. These plugins can be difficult to assess in terms of quality and are a common source of security breaches.

We’ve seen a 150% growth in vulnerabilities reported in 2021 compared to 2020 which is a significant increase. Meanwhile, 29% of the Wordpress plugins with critical vulnerabilities received no patch.

Patchstack.com

The popularity of Wordpress means that it is also a more popular target for exploitation. Historically Wordpress vulnerabilities are more serious than Django vulnerabilities (e.g. compare ‘code execution’ vulnerabilities in these tables: Wordpress Vulnerability Statistics and Django Vulnerability Statistics).

#3. Wagtail’s CMS offers a better admin experience

Without extensive effort, a default Wordpress installation will include a lot of superfluous functionality in the user interface, including ads and what can feel like an endless stream of notifications about installed plugins. Upgrading plugins and the Wordpress installation itself can become a regular chore that needs to be done regularly before creating or editing content.

Wagtail’s CMS is designed with a minimal interface that can be extended as necessary, meaning that options available to a user in the CMS are almost always relevant and easy to understand.

Where Wordpress has the simple concepts of ‘published’ and ‘draft’ content, Wagtail includes a well thought out editing workflow where authors can submit content for moderation, and editors can apply changes, or return the content to the original author for amendments.

Screenshot of Wagtail's CMS

A screenshot of the Wagtail CMS

#4. Wagtail offers better flexibility and a range of easy-to-implement features

When creating content, Wagtail offers users the ability to use ‘Streamfields’ where a user can “build a mixed sequence of content types” without fear of producing a page that breaks the site’s brand aesthetic. This is often claimed to be a favourite feature of Wagtail users.

Wordpress more recently adopted a similar ‘content block’ approach (named project Gutenberg) but has been a source of frustration for users that were forced to use it after updating their Wordpress installations. This was ‘resolved’ by adding a plugin that allows users to opt out and continue using the ‘classic’ editor. Unfortunately this option will only be supported until 2022.

Wagtail offers the option of A/B testing, where users can create different versions of pages and produce reports showing which is more effective at encouraging visitors to complete a specific goal.

Because Wagtail is built on the web framework, Django, there is very little in the way of functionality that can’t be added. This means that a Wagtail website can essentially include any feature and functionality that you might expect to find in a web app.

St Patrick's College Silverstream website mockups

Mockups of the St Patrick’s College Silverstream website built on Wagtail by Obvious Brand Partners.

#5. Wagtail uses popular and highly respected frameworks and languages

The Python programming language is amongst the most popular languages taught in universities. Python developers also tend to be more experienced than PHP programmers as there is a higher barrier of entry.

Django is the most popular web framework written in Python, and Wagtail is the most popular CMS based on Django. Not only are they popular, but they’re also respected enough to be increasingly used by organisations such as Google and NASA. That’s why at Obvious, we’ve made it the primary CMS on which we build our clients’ websites.

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