SoBold are delighted to become only the 3rd Platinum Certified Cookiebot Partner in the United Kingdom. 

Cookiebot consent management platform (CMP) is a leading compliance solution that detects and controls all cookies and trackers in use on a website, and automatically manages end-user consents.

SoBold have been working closely with Cookiebot since the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into place on 24 May 2018 providing their clients with transparency and control over the cookies used on their websites. Since partnering with Cookiebot as a reseller, SoBold have worked with clients including Transport for London and the London Transport Museum to develop bespoke implementations of the Cookiebot CMP. More information on SoBold’s work with Transport for London can be found here.

In October 2022, Cookiebot launched a tiered partner and certification program. As a leading Cookiebot reseller SoBold has been named as a Platinum Certified partner, highlighting its expertise with the Cookiebot platform and data privacy compliance in general.

By becoming a Platinum Certified Cookiebot Partner, SoBold will be able to continue to offer more support to leading businesses needing bespoke Cookiebot solutions. 

Cookiebot Sales & Channel Manager, Grant MacInnes said:

Congratulations to Sam Phillips & SoBold on joining our very elite group of platinum certified resellers. Looking forward to continuing to work closely with you and the team over the coming months and years.

SoBold Technical Director, Sam Phillips said:

By becoming just the 3rd Platinum Certified Cookiebot partner in the UK we have continued to cement our position as a leading Cookiebot reseller. Having been one of the first resellers of Cookiebot in 2018, our partnership with Cookiebot continues to go from strength to strength and we are looking forward to developing more bespoke implementations for Cookiebot’s enterprise user base as a fully certified partner.

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The end-to-end process of web design is made up of a number of different phases that should all inform and complement each other. 

When working with a web design and development agency, they should use their expertise and experience to guide you through this process, which consists of:

• In-depth research and careful planning
• Visual exploration and mood boards
• User experience (UX) design 
• User interface (UI) design.

Once you’ve completed each of those phases and you have a design that you’re proud of, your agency partner will be tasked with preparing your website for development.

This article will explain the process of preparing a website for development, helping you understand what’s involved, what to expect, and how to approach it.

Designing  Your Website Across Different Break-Points 

In a recent article, we explained how the purpose of your UX is to help your visitors complete a task or process on your website as easily as possible, ultimately leading them to follow a call-to-action. 

Your UX is brought to life by your UI, which includes all the visual and interactive elements of your website, from colour and font to buttons and scrolling. 

Towards the end of the UI design phase, the next step will be to roll out your designs across a number of break-points. 

Break-points are the screen sizes of devices that your design will fit within. This allows your website to be designed as responsive and optimised for use across a wide range of different devices and channels. 

This is important because certain aspects of your site may not translate down perfectly across different screen sizes. 

Here at SoBold, we design sites across the following break-points, but this may vary from agency to agency:

• 1,920px – For most external computer monitor sizes
• 1,366px – For most laptop screen sizes
• 992px – For most Notebook and iPad devices
• 768px – For most other tablet devices
• 375px – For most smartphones.

If you want your website to be designed as mobile-first, it’s important to raise it at the beginning of the project so your agency can create your wireframes in that context. However, you should only ever make that decision based on real data regarding your target audience’s preferences. 

In this case, your agency should work with you to conduct some additional research and determine the best screen size for your particular audience. This will ensure the UX designers work with the right starting point for your high-fidelity wireframes.

A Thorough Hand-Over from Design to Development 

This phase of a website project involves a process that takes a lot of careful work and close collaboration between the different teams within an agency. 

Here at SoBold, we make a point to ensure the design team talks the development team through all the work they’ve done on your mood boards, UX design, and UI design in detail. This includes explaining the decision making process behind everything they’ve designed.

While a lot of agencies will just hand the designs to the developers and ask them to start building, we believe this is something that should be treated as more of a team effort. Doing so as a core part of our process has proven to add tremendous value to the work our clients have received in recent years. 

It’s beneficial to the overall project for the developers to fully understand why the decisions have been made about the designs. It’s also important that they’re given a detailed run through of what they’re building within the context of the whole site.

For example, there may be a fairly complex block which is built early on in the development process. If the developers are made aware that slight variations of this same block will be used several times throughout the site, they can save valuable time and work more efficiently by repurposing the first block when it’s first built. 

This hand-over is crucial in ensuring the development process runs smoothly, providing you with a high-performance website that meets your expectations, delivered on time and within budget.

A Well Designed Website Ready to Be Built 

After the hand-over is complete, your agency will be able to export all your design assets and the developers will begin building your website. 

While web design may seem straightforward when explained like this, in reality it’s a complex process that requires a great deal of specialist skills and expertise. That’s why it’s so important to have the support of an agency partner you can trust and rely on to guide you. 

Working with a talented agency will ensure you’re able to create a unique design that will resonate with your target audience and help you achieve your strategic business goals through your new website. 

Keep an eye out for our upcoming blog series where we’ll walk you step-by-step through the web development process, making it far more approachable and easy to manage for you.

If you’d like to discover how generative AI technology is transforming the web design and development space, read our recent article here. 

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Finding a content management system (CMS) that is secure, cost-effective, and capable of delivering a website that meets all your requirements can be challenging.

As we’ve discussed in a previous article, there are lots of excellent CMSs available today, and it’s difficult to know which one will be the best fit for your specific business. 

While most CMSs appear similar on the surface, with the same fundamental functionality, popular platforms like Webflow and WordPress have unique features and capabilities that differentiate them from each other. 

So, selecting between these two different platforms is an important process that requires careful consideration. After all, your CMS is a long-term investment, and you need to know exactly what you’re getting before you make your decision.

To ease this challenge for you, this article will provide a direct, objective comparison between the Webflow and WordPress platforms.

An Overview of Each Platform 

You want a CMS that will enable you to build sophisticated, high-performance websites, tailored to your business, with a set of tools that are simple and easy-to-use. 

Webflow and WordPress can both give you exactly that in their own distinctive styles. Both platforms allow you to build and manage complex websites without deep technical knowledge, but they each take slightly different approaches. 

Webflow

Webflow is a software-as-a-service product, not a typical CMS. That means it doesn’t require any hosting and is primarily delivered via Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud servers. 

As it’s a complete, mostly self-contained SaaS application, with everything built-in to it from the start, you can get up and running with your Webflow website quickly and easily.

You can use Webflow as a basic no-code website builder straight away. However, as you’ll certainly want to create a more dynamic, engaging website with a high volume of content, you’ll have to enable its CMS functionality to get up and running properly.

WordPress 

WordPress, on the other hand, is a more traditional CMS, intended to build highly scalable, dynamic websites full of rich content. The platform will need to be downloaded on to hosting servers, which can all be taken care of for you if you’re going to be working with an agency partner. 

WordPress is also a free, open-source platform, which means all users have access to its code. That allows talented developers to contribute to improving the platform with innovative new additions and enhancements on a near-constant basis. 

As WordPress is used to build almost half the websites online today, it also has a global community made up of millions of users who offer support, collaboration, knowledge sharing, events, and much more. 

Approachability and Ease-of-Use

A shared benefit of both Webflow and WordPress over certain other CMSs is their ease-of-use.

Both these platforms are approachable with low barriers for entry, even if you don’t have any existing coding or content management experience.

Webflow’s Usability 

As a low-code or no-code SaaS tool, almost anyone can use Webflow to build a website.

It provides a visual drag-and-drop builder with an emphasis on enabling users to create websites quickly and easily.

When using the CMS functionality to add more content to your website, like blog posts, the CMS is simple, allowing you to publish and manage the pages of your site with great efficiency. This is in the style of a classic content editor, which will probably be familiar to you.

WordPress’s Usability 

Almost anyone can use WordPress as well, even if you have no previous content management experience, hence its global popularity. In fact, simplicity and usability are arguably some of WordPress’s greatest strengths.

Almost everything you’ll need to set up and manage your website will be readily available when you first start using WordPress, making it very approachable. The platform provides you with an intuitive user interface (UI) that allows quick and easy publishing, management, and editing of content.

This is made even more efficient thanks to WordPress’s block-based editor. This is a method of building websites that offers significant advantages in flexibility, scalability, and ease-of-use. 

Particularly for large-scale websites that are likely to grow and evolve, this can save your developers valuable time and money, while also reducing your time-to-market.

You can learn all about the advantages of the WordPress block-based editor in our related article here. 

Their Features and Functionality  

For your investment in your CMS to be successful, it will need to have a range of features and functionality which allow you to create a website that delivers on your business objectives.

Webflow’s Features 

As touched on earlier, Webflow is a SaaS application in which almost everything you need is included as standard.

The core Webflow platform is all you need to build your site, although your agency will be able to add extra features for you by embedding code snippets from other services if you need them. 

For example, if you want to create the ability for your visitors to subscribe to your site as members, you could take code from another platform that facilitates subscriptions and use that to integrate the functionality. 

This is where the platforms start to deviate in approach. Webflow’s self-contained nature perhaps makes it a simpler platform because it doesn’t require many plugins, but that also makes it a lot more limited than WordPress.

Because Webflow doesn’t offer any plugins, you won’t be able to add many extensions that work directly in the Webflow interface. This prevents you from having one unified approach to your website management and marketing.

WordPress’s Features 

Most of the things you require to publish content and manage your website on a daily basis come readily available on the WordPress platform. WordPress’s sophisticated, dynamic features that come “out-of-the-box” are a great point of value.

However, if you do need to go beyond the standard functionality of WordPress, that can also be done with relative ease. Working with an agency with WordPress-specific expertise means that you can develop bespoke features and functionality unique to your website with almost no limitations. 

This allows you to tailor your CMS to meet your specific needs, and working with an agency to achieve this can still be very cost-effective. 

Not only that, but passionate members of the global community are always working hard to create new features and extensions that continue to improve the capabilities of the platform for free. 

How Well do they Integrate with Other Systems?

Beyond features, extensions, and plugins, your platform of choice should also be able to integrate easily with other tools and systems that are already present within your business. 

Integrating with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, your email marketing system, and other software products is an important quality for a CMS to have.

Integrating with Webflow

While Webflow can integrate with some third-party tools, this is another area where the platform is somewhat limited. You can integrate your Webflow site with other tools, but there aren’t many native integrations available. Your agency partner will need to use more code embeds to achieve this, and you’ll have to use separate interfaces in many situations.

For example, using a lead generation form from your CRM on a Webflow site will require you to build the form in the CRM first, then add it to your web page using the embed code.

Not only does this approach create inconvenience for you and your team, but the extra time spent by your agency on more complex integrations will increase the overall long-term cost of the platform.

Integrating with WordPress 

Thanks to WordPress’s vast popularity, and the work of the global community, there are native plugins that can seamlessly integrate your WordPress site with almost any other tool or system. 

Simply add a plugin for any third-party tool to create the ability to access that tool’s functionality directly within your WordPress CMS. 

Even for more advanced requirements that need some bespoke development, like cross-platform automation, it’s usually an easier job for your development agency than it would be with most other platforms. 

How Secure Are these Platforms? 

Security should be a top priority when selecting a CMS. Concerns over cyber security and data protection are ever-increasing for businesses, so you need to ensure something as important as your website is fully secure.

Webflow’s Security 

Webflow is mostly based on AWS, an industry leader in secure hosting, so you can rest assured your platform will be highly secure. Webflow also has additional protective measures in place to bolster the security of all the data on the platform. 

Again, because it’s a SaaS product, this all comes out-the-box and doesn’t require you to take any steps yourself to secure your site.

However, that does mean you’re entirely reliant on Webflow to ensure that security is continually updated and reinforced. Neither you nor your agency partner have any control over the security of your site, which some businesses see as a negative. 

WordPress’s Security 

Your agency partner will typically be responsible for the hosting, maintenance, and security of your WordPress platform. We mention hosting and maintenance here because these things are influential towards ensuring your platform, and your website, are kept secure. 

WordPress is already a very secure platform out-of-the-box, though. There’s no need to think that WordPress’s protection is not robust enough for a large business, even in today’s volatile security landscape. Evidence of this security can be found in the number of global enterprise businesses that have chosen WordPress as their CMS.

Of course, there are vulnerabilities that can arise in certain scenarios, like if your platform isn’t kept fully updated on a constant basis. For this reason, it’s crucial to work with an agency partner who you can trust and rely on when it comes to security, including enterprise-grade hosting and continual platform maintenance. 

You can learn more about the security of the WordPress platform in our in-depth guide here. 

You can also discover 10 useful tips to further improve WordPress security and minimise your risks here. 

The Overall Cost and CTO 

As mentioned earlier, your CMS is not only a big investment, it’s also a long-term one. You ideally need to find a platform that offers good value for money, and a low total cost of ownership (TCO), in order to achieve a strong return on investment (ROI).

Your TCO will be determined by combining everything from your hosting costs, license fees, work with your agency, maintenance, bespoke development, and more.

Webflow

In terms of costs and plans, Webflow is more expensive than WordPress. This SaaS product offers two different types of plans, a site plan and a workplace plan. 

The average enterprise business with a dynamic website will be looking at costs of between £300 and £500 with Webflow. This makes it a far more cost-effective alternative than large-scale CSMs like Sitecore. 

As discussed throughout this article, though, Webflow’s lack of native plugins and integrations will also make bespoke development work more difficult and time-consuming for your agency. This will inevitably drive up the platform’s TCO, and that’s something you should carefully consider when evaluating your options.

WordPress 

WordPress is a more cost-effective platform, with a generally low TCO for most businesses. Its open-source nature means it’s free to use, limiting your initial costs to just hosting, agency fees, and post-deployment support. Any plugins or extensions of the platform will be licensed and paid for separately.

Since WordPress is such an intuitive and easy-to-use platform, any bespoke development work you need your agency partner to complete will still come at a reasonable cost. Similarly, whenever the WordPress platform is updated, testing and maintaining your site can be done in just a few hours. This creates a significantly lower TCO than you’d have with almost all other enterprise CMSs.

Make the Right Choice for Your Business 

Webflow and WordPress are both good platforms in their own right, with plenty of value to offer. The key thing to understand when making this comparison is that your CMS of choice needs to align with your business’s unique requirements and specific objectives. 

For instance, Webflow might be a suitable choice for one of your smaller competitors, but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be a good fit for you if you need more advanced features and functionality. 

Whether you’re developing a bespoke website from scratch, or migrating your existing site to a new platform, you must ensure your CMS can deliver on your needs both now and as your business grows over time.

If you need further help selecting a CMS for your website project, read our comprehensive guide to understanding and evaluating the options for large businesses here.

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Making the best possible choice of content management system (CMS) is crucial for the success of your website. But, these days, not only do you have to navigate the many different options – from WordPress to Sitecore to Webflow – you also have the added challenge of deciding whether to go “headless” or not. 

Whether to take the less conventional headless approach with your CMS is a decision that could cause some confusion. It could even cause some challenges with your website if you end up making the wrong choice.

In this article, we’ll help you understand exactly what a headless CMS is, when you may need to take that approach, and highlight some key considerations to make before finalising your choice. 

What is a Headless CMS?

With a traditional CMS, the back-end and the front-end of the system are directly linked. This is how you use your CMS for both the content management (back-end) and to control how the content is presented to your website visitors (front-end). 

In this context, the back-end of the CMS is sometimes referred to as the “body” and the “head” is the front-end. In a headless CMS, that front-end is decoupled from the back-end of the system, hence the term headless. With this approach, you use the back-end as normal for content management and the presentation of content in the front-end is handled completely separately. 

This is valuable because it allows you to design your website front-end however you like, without any restrictions. However, it also requires more technical work from your development agency as a trade-off. 

With a headless CMS, your content is presented to your audience on your live website by using APIs that take it from the back-end of the CMS. This use of APIs also allows you to publish the same content in a variety of different formats via different channels as well, but more on that later. 

Scenarios in Which You Might Need a Headless CMS

It’s important to understand that you should only take a headless approach if it’s the most suitable way to meet a specific set of requirements or objectives.

Some scenarios in which you might need to take a closer look at adopting a headless CMS include: 

If a large volume of content is a key component of your marketing strategy. 

If you’re going to be producing and publishing a lot of content on your website, you may benefit from a headless CMS. Many people find it easier and more intuitive managing websites in the back-end of a headless CMS.

The decoupling of the front-end also means that your development agency will be the ones responsible for ensuring your audience is presented with dynamic, engaging content. 

If you expect to have high volumes of traffic and need to maintain performance. 

If the size of your website’s audience will put a heavy demand on your CMS’s performance, a headless system could be a worthwhile investment. Using APIs, and leveraging other intelligent techniques, the headless approach often delivers faster loading times, reduces the workload on your servers, and offers greater scalability.

If you have a multi-channel marketing strategy, or need to publish content across multiple digital touch-points. 

The headless approach allows you to take one piece of content, upload it into the back-end, and seamlessly publish it across several channels, including website, mobile app, social media, email, and even internet-of-things (IoT) devices.

This can help you maximise consistency, while providing your users in each channel an experience optimised for their preferred context.

If you’re prioritising personalisation. 

As personalisation is becoming much more important in modern marketing, headless CMSs are becoming more popular in enabling those tactics. 

If you need to create personalised experiences for your website visitors based on their demographic data, past behaviour, preferences, and so on, a headless CMS may be the right option. This is a useful approach for delivering tailored content to individual visitors, improving your engagement and increasing conversions.

If you have a multi-lingual or multi-regional website. 

Delivering the same content to visitors in different languages, across different locations, can also be made easier by using a headless CMS. Your localisation process can be streamlined by managing the content for all users just once in the back-end, then delivering it seamlessly in its different forms based on location or other conditions. 

Key Considerations and Potential Pitfalls

While a headless CMS can be a great choice to deliver on the requirements discussed here, it’s still not a straightforward decision in these scenarios. 

Firstly, it’s important to note that a traditional CMS like WordPress can still help you achieve all the things listed above, especially with the support of an experienced, talented agency. Secondly, there are some downsides to the headless approach that need to be considered while you’re evaluating your options.

Security

Security is an issue that needs careful consideration when looking into the headless approach. The headless architecture, and use of APIs, create more security vulnerabilities than you’d have with a traditional CMS.

It’s also common for a headless CMS to require more hands-on management in key areas such as hosting and compliance, as well as more thorough and frequent testing. 

Development Complexity

When you ask your development agency to build, manage, and maintain your website using a headless CMS, you’re asking them for more complex work than they’d be facing with a traditional system. This complexity is something you need to be aware of, both in your selection of an agency capable of delivering your requirements, and in the additional workload you’re asking them to complete for you. 

Time-to-Market 

Following on from the previous point, more complex development work often results in a longer time-to-market for your website. 

Developing a website using a headless CMS may require more time and resources from your agency to deliver the work for you. If you need to get your site up and running quickly, or if you may require future development work to be delivered quickly, a regular CMS may be a safer bet. 

Technical Skills 

Publishing content with a headless CMS may be easy, but if something goes wrong, or you need something changed, you’re unlikely to be able to do it yourself. A headless CMS requires more technical skills and development experience to maintain than a traditional CMS, even for small tasks. If you don’t have these skills in your team, you’ll be more reliant on your agency partner than you would be with a normal CMS.

Total Cost of Ownership 

All the points listed here will add up to a higher total cost of ownership (TCO). When accounting for the higher volume and greater complexity of work you’ll require from your agency, you’re likely to spend a lot more of your budget on a headless CMS. 

Unless you have specific complex requirements that demand the use of a headless CMS, it’s usually the more cost-efficient option to go with the more traditional approach.

Content Strategy

With all that said, it’s also important to consider whether a headless CMS is even necessary based on your content strategy. 

Unless you have an intricate, wide-ranging content strategy that spans various channels and platforms, it might not be worth adopting a headless CMS at all. 

Most of the requirements you have can likely be delivered by working with a reliable agency partner using a sophisticated, flexible CMS like WordPress. 

It’s also important to note that WordPress can be used in a headless context as well. This offers you a balance between a familiar, easy-to-use system and a more dynamic UX for your visitors in the front-end.

The Benefits of a Headless CMS 

If you do decide to take a headless approach, your CMS can deliver a wealth of benefits and strategic advantages. These include: 

Scalability

The headless architecture will enable you to build out your digital presence rapidly, on a large scale, across multiple channels. This scalability will be crucial for your website as your business grows and your requirements evolve. 

Customisation

Both the back-end of your headless CMS and the front-end presentation of your content are entirely customisable, tailored to your specific requirements. 

Flexibility

Headless CMSs provide a great deal of flexibility in terms of your selection of technology, content creation, and implementation of a multi-channel market strategy. 

Ease-of-Use

If you work with a skilled agency partner who can set up and manage your system for you, publishing and editing content with a headless CMS becomes quick, easy, and efficient. 

User Experience 

Delivering your content seamlessly – and consistently – across a wide range of channels and digital touch-points creates a far greater UX for your target audience. 

Performance

The headless architecture removes the need to render pages on your server. This creates the faster loading times and improved performance discussed previously, which also contributes to a better experience for your visitors. 

Competitive Differentiation

As mentioned earlier, the headless approach allows you to create a truly unique UX. In an increasingly crowded, noisy online landscape, this can help you differentiate your website and stand above your competitors. 

Future-Proofing

A headless CMS allows you to easily change or upgrade the technology you use for your front-end without having any impact on your back-end. This will help you become more agile and adapt quickly as new technology trends emerge in future. 

Making the Right Decision for Your Unique Requirements 

Ultimately, you should base your decision here on the specific requirements you have for your website and the circumstances you find yourself in. 

While a headless CMS does offer a range of innovative capabilities, the additional costs and resources you’ll need to invest may not be worthwhile. For example, the traditional use of WordPress can provide you with most of the benefits discussed earlier.

Carefully consider your objectives, your strategy, and the resources you have available. Use those to weigh up all the pros and cons listed in this article in relation to your own website project.  

The key thing is to clearly understand exactly what you need from your CMS, and use that to select the option that aligns best with your requirements.

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Deciding between two content management systems (CMS) is no easy task. Your CMS is an important long-term investment, so you must ensure you choose a platform that will meet all your requirements, both now and in future.

If you’re currently weighing up the pros and cons between Contentful and WordPress, there are some key differences between the two platforms that you should be aware of. 

To make this evaluation process easier for you, and help you pick the best option for your business, this article provides a direct, objective comparison between these platforms.

Platform Overviews

Different types of software will provide you with different capabilities and limitations. The Contentful and WordPress platforms can both deliver quality enterprise-grade websites, but they each take a slightly different approach.

Contentful 

Contentful is a cloud-based “headless” CMS. Being headless means that the back-end of the platform you use to publish, edit, and manage content is not directly connected to the front-end of your live website.

Your content is managed and stored in one central hub, hosted within the cloud, and this is the back-end of your platform (also known as the “body”). APIs are then used to take your content from the back-end and present it in website form. 

A headless CMS gives you a high level of flexibility and customisation with your website’s front-end. These same APIs allow you to publish your content in different formats in different channels as well, facilitating a multi-channel approach to marketing. 

This makes Contentful a flexible platform that can meet a range of different content requirements, but it is admittedly more complicated than the traditional approach to website management.

WordPress 

WordPress is a traditional CMS that provides a more straightforward approach to managing your website. You can use WordPress to build sophisticated, dynamic sites with a simple, user-friendly set of tools. 

While most  businesses use WordPress in the traditional way, the platform can be leveraged with a headless approach as well, allowing it to match the scalability and multi-channel capabilities of solutions like Contentful. 

WordPress gives you the flexibility to choose how you’d like to develop your website, based on the complexity and size of the project, and the objectives you’re trying to achieve. In the likely case that you’re working with a web design and development agency, that can all be handled for you by your partner. 

The Scalability of Each Platform 

Your business will grow and evolve over time, so you need a platform that can quickly and easily scale up with new features and functionality. You also need to ensure the platform can handle high volumes of traffic and maintain performance as your audience grows. That’s why scalability is one of the most important aspects to consider when choosing a CMS. 

How Scalable is Contentful? 

One of the main benefits of a headless CMS is that the infrastructure allows you to grow your digital presence rapidly, on a large scale. 

The back-end offers easy customisation, and the cloud-based nature of the platform allows you to scale up dynamically whenever you need to. 

Its multi-channel capabilities also inherently promote the idea of developing your content in different formats at a larger scale, while always maintaining consistency. This enables you to produce individual pieces of content once and easily repurpose them across different channels a number of times, saving valuable time and resources. 

This can all be done without any concerns over technical issues like server capacity or network bandwidth, because the platform is delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. 

How Scalable is WordPress? 

WordPress is a highly scalable platform in its own right, currently used to power the websites of some of the largest and most successful businesses in the world.

The platform is agile and scalable enough to grow seamlessly alongside your business and adapt to your changing requirements, whichever way you decide to use it.

As mentioned earlier, taking the headless approach with WordPress can provide the same enhanced scalability and pervasive multi-channel capabilities as Contentful, if you require those aspects from your CMS. This can also deliver benefits with speed of development and time-to-market, saving you valuable costs with your agency partner. 

Expanding your WordPress site with the more traditional approach is made even easier than most other CMSs as well, thanks to the platform’s unique block-based editor. This is a method of building websites that provides great benefits in the areas of flexibility, efficiency, and ease-of-use. 

WordPress also allows you to continually enhance your site with new features and functionality through bespoke development, with almost no limitations on what can be achieved. 

Ease-of-Use

Like all technology, some tools are more approachable for the majority of users, while others will require some existing skills. This makes ease-of-use a key part of your criteria when selecting a platform to manage your website. You’ll be using it almost every day, after all, so you need to be comfortable with it.

How Easy is Contentful to Use?

While Contentful being solely a headless CMS does have its advantages, such as scalability and customisation, this approach also creates some challenges for the average user.

For example, adding content to Contentful can be difficult because it doesn’t provide you with a way to preview how your content will look in the front-end of the website. 

Contentful doesn’t have a simple editing interface on the front-end, so there’s a much higher risk of error with this platform than with most others. 

Granted, Contentful’s user interface (UI) is well structured and intuitive, but it’s also known for being more difficult for non-technical users than platforms like WordPress.

Handling the API rules is also complicated without the help of an experienced web development team. If you’re working with an agency, you may end up calling on them regularly for tasks that you could likely handle yourself in other CMSs.

How Easy is WordPress to Use?

Conversely, WordPress is renowned for its simplicity and ease-of-use. Even if you don’t have any existing knowledge of coding or content management, WordPress is very approachable and easy to learn. 

When you first get started with WordPress, virtually everything you need to set up and manage your website will be readily available within the platform.

Publishing, managing, and editing in WordPress are all quick and convenient, thanks to an intuitive back-end that provides you with everything you need to build out a content-rich website.

Thanks to this ease-of-use, most of the people within your team will be able to use WordPress, allowing you to share the responsibility of the daily management and running of your site. 

It is worth noting that taking a headless approach with WordPress does also require experienced web developers to be able to manage the platform though.

Security 

Security should always be a top priority with any software you introduce into your business. If you’re considering a CMS that seems like it could be unable to provide the enterprise-grade security you need, it’s wise to continue looking for more reliable alternatives. 

How Secure is Contentful?

As a cloud-based SaaS product, Contentful comes with useful in-built security features, including HTTPS data encryption, role-based access controls, and multi-factor authentication.

Headless CMSs also take a different approach to security compared to traditional platforms like WordPress. Its use of APIs allows you to control access to your content through a token-based authentication system, and it uses industry-standard encryption and secure storage measures to protect your data. With that in mind, Contentful should be seen as a very secure and robust platform. 

How Secure is WordPress?

WordPress is a secure, platform. To find proof of this, you only need to look as far as the wealth of global enterprise businesses that have chosen WordPress as their CMS.

As with any software, though, there will always be vulnerabilities or potential risks that can arise in certain scenarios. For example, WordPress regularly releases updates to its software, and failing to test your platform upon these releases could lead to bugs or security issues creeping in. Similarly, certain plugins can create security problems if taken from the wrong sources or left untested for too long.

Finding an experienced agency partner you can depend on is usually a wise move to reinforce the security of your website. That partner will also be able to support you with important related services like hosting, maintenance, and ongoing optimisation. 

Discover how the WordPress platform can deliver enterprise-grade security in our related article here. 

Cost and TCO 

Your CMS also needs to deliver good value for money and a low total cost of ownership (TCO).

To understand your long-term TCO, you’ll need to take into account things like license fees, hosting costs, maintenance, bespoke development with your agency, and more.

Contentful’s Initial Costs and Ongoing Investment 

Contentful has basic and premium pricing plans for businesses, although you can use the platform for free to see if it’s a good fit first. 

The basic plan starts at around £250 per month and supports up to twenty users, so it’s only suitable for small businesses. The premium plan is priced based on the resources you’ll use, such as number of users, API requests, and storage. You can usually expect this to start at around £450 per month.

However, as mentioned earlier, most businesses will require a lot of support from an agency to get the platform set up in both the back-end and front-end. You’ll likely need ongoing work from an agency to ensure you can use the platform to its full potential as well, which won’t come cheap. 

All these things tend to add up to a high TCO over time, making Contentful less cost-efficient than some of the other CMSs around today.

WordPress’s Low TCO

WordPress is one of those solutions that is far more cost-efficient than Contentful, with a much more reasonable TCO. 

Its software is open-source and the platform free to use. This means your initial costs are limited to just hosting, agency fees, and any other support you may need once your site is live. Plugins and extensions of the platform are licensed and paid for separately.

As WordPress is such an intuitive and easy-to-use platform, it’s also affordable to run it and manage it, even if you do use an agency to handle that for you. This includes any bespoke development or customisation requirements you may have, which experienced agencies can often deliver with a very fast time-to-market as well.

Which Platform is Right for You?

Both these CMSs will enable you to build sophisticated, high-performance websites that will support your business goals and allow you to gain an edge over your competition.

As you’ve seen throughout this comparison article, they each have their strengths and weaknesses, as do all the other CMSs available today. That means you need to base your decision on which one is the best fit for your specific business.

For example, a headless CMS, whether that’s Contentful or WordPress, may be too complex in many cases. But if you’re looking to execute a holistic multi-channel marketing strategy, it might be the right choice for you. 

In the early stages of your evaluation process, it’s crucial to carefully consider your own unique requirements, objectives, budget, resources, agency relationships, and various other factors.  

In order to make the right decision between two CMSs, you need to understand which one will be more suitable to deliver on your needs and expectations, both in the immediate term and for years to come. 

Still not convinced? Discover five key benefits of WordPress’s industry-leading scalability in our related article here. 

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