The idea of this thread is for previous WordPress users to say what Kirby gave to them that WordPress could not. In general, the benefits of Kirby over WordPress.
Insane speed mostly. The last Wordpress site i tested scored just 33.
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Some non-obvious advantages iāve experienced.
Longevity
Wordpress needs much more maintenance. It needs to be updated and db has to be kept alive. I have Kirby sites that i havenāt touched for 4 years that are still live and well with owners adding new content.
Simplicity
It is much easier to take old Kirby website and edit/update/redesign it - even for a third party. Iāve successfully completely redesigned old Kirby based websites while leaving most of the old content the same. And i have also stopped working on some Kirby sites and someone else came and build on that without single question. In my experience itās easy even for PHP programmers that never worked with Kirby.
Also for myself itās much easier to come to 3year old Kirby project and update something there. I dread to come back and change something in 3 year old WP theme that iāve coded because i always break something.
Wordpress theme redesign usually means trashing the old site and somehow migrating old data.
The two main reasons for this are
- There are very few abstractions in Kirby - code is much more straightforward ānakedā. In WP there are 10 frameworks that all do things differently and are their own worlds. You never know what you are getting into.
- Kirby content folder is basically very structured database. In wordpress content is often just big pile of unstructured rows that are tied to pieces of UI.
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Reason 1: Security
Reason 2: Reliability
We have a client that has had the same Kirby 2 site for almost 5 years now. Weāve begged and begged for them to update it: itās really old codebase now, and they need to update it to get speed & SEO up to current standards. They donāt want to, because āit works just greatā. How many WordPress sites do we have that are > 2 years old? None.
Reason 3: Flexibility , without compromising code quality. Every plugin you have to install in a WordPress site adds to the complexity of the system, increases maintenance, and makes the site less secure and more prone to bugs. There is no way to build even a simple WordPress site without dozens of plugins. Kirby, on the other hand, is a complete framework that allows us to build amazingly complex sites without having to rely on dozens of third-party add-ons even for the most basic functionality.
Reason 4: Client Empowerment - our Kirby clients use and update their websites more regularly than their WordPress clients, and are much more likely to ask us for upgrades and enhancements. In general, they feel happier and more āin controlā of their own site.
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