I’ve teamed up with a Kirby developer. We’ve bid for a couple of project recently and was told by both potential clients that we didn’t get the work because they wanted to stick with WordPress.
We’ve put together a one page recommendations for choosing Kirby. Can it be improved? I’m not sure the last point still holds true?
======
Most modern websites will have a Content Management System (CMS). As the name suggests, a CMS allows users to manage the content on the website – pages, text, images etc. There are numerous different CMS’s. WordPress is well known, but we recommend Kirby CMS, for the following reasons:
Our clients prefer using Kirby to WordPress. Kirby is intuitive and easier to use than WordPress. If you can use WordPress, you’ll find Kirby a cinch.
Kirby is a fully featured CMS. It does everything that most users need. If plugins are required to do a particular job, they are carefully vetted by Kirby and well maintained.
It’s fast, modern, reliable and more and more people are turning to it.
Due to the way Kirby is built, it is inherently more secure and less vulnerable to hacking than WordPress. Also, WordPress sites often require a lot of plugins to function, which then need to be kept up-to-date or the site risks breaking or becoming insecure.
Kirby is a professional product. Reassuringly, unlike WordPress, Kirby is a paid for product, with a one-off fee, and backed by professional support. Kirby has been in business since 2012. It is used on over 40k sites, and by large names like the New York Times, Harvard and Philips.
Kirby provides the functionality to help reduce the carbon footprint of websites.
Your content is not locked in to Kirby. It is very easy to migrate to any other CMS. And there are plenty of Kirby developers, so you’re not tied in to continuing to use us.
Kirby has always been a CMS. WordPress started as a blogging tool, but has been repurposed as a CMS. This change means that aspects of WordPress are not designed for the purpose it is now used for.
This list of “arguments” would not convince me as a customer - or as a developer. There are no powerful arguments. The “Wow!” experience is missing. It reads like a string of cherry-picked phrases without a recognizable “common thread”.
Put yourself in the user’s shoes. The customer is - usually - not interested in the technology. The customer is interested in an intuitive backend. They should have fun creating pages and changing content. Just as much fun as we as programmers have with Kirby.
Did you ask why they want to - or have to - stick with WordPress? Is habit the reason? Or fear of change?
With this statement you are already promoting a change before the customer switches from WordPress to Kirby.
You could build the same site twice… once with Kirby and again in Wordpress. Try to pick the fancy features like layouts and blocks etc. Share with the client screenshots of the kirby panel alongside the equivelent page in Wordpress admin. Also share with them performance statisticss of both sites.
I keep meaning to do this myself but dont have much time to spend picking up Wordpress.
And that is where Kirby really shines. You can adapt the interface to any project type, customize to the max. No unnecessary elements, easy to guide user through it (think of help text, info fields etc)
Plus, content types are easy to set up (and to structure the interface according to these product types), be it products, blog articles, events, you name them. And the same is true for blocks. Customer wants this and that type of block? Easy. Much more difficult to do in WordPress (so a cost factor). This guidance also make switching easy, not steep learning curve using the interface.
But I think this is something that the customer needs to see/experience, particularly in comparison to a Wordpress interface.
And I think the arguments should focus on the particular project needs of a particular customer.
Visual examples that I think are really convincing in this context: https://kirbysites.com
Hey thanks everyone! Here’s the next iteration. We’re fairly happy with this.
======
Most modern websites will have a Content Management System (CMS). As the name suggests, a CMS allows users to manage the content on the website – pages, text, images etc. There are numerous different CMS’s. WordPress is well known, but we recommend Kirby CMS, for the following reasons:
Our clients prefer using Kirby to WordPress. Kirby is intuitive and easier to use than WordPress. If you can use WordPress, you’ll find Kirby a cinch. The Kirby admin interface will be bespoke to your website, so there are no unnecessary elements, buttons and stuff getting in the way of you managing your website as easily as possible.
Kirby is a fully featured CMS. It does everything that WordPress can. If plugins are required to do a particular job, they are carefully vetted by Kirby and well maintained.
Kirby is modern, reliable and more and more people are turning to it.
Kirby websites are fast to load, which is good for your visitors, your search engine rankings and therefore you.
Due to the way Kirby is built, it is inherently more secure and less vulnerable to hacking than WordPress. Also, WordPress sites often require a lot of plugins to function, which then need to be kept up-to-date or the site risks breaking or becoming insecure.
Reassuringly, unlike WordPress, Kirby is a professional product, with a one-off fee, and backed by professional support. Kirby has been in business since 2012. It is used on over 40,000 sites, and by large names like the New York Times, Harvard and Philips.
Kirby provides the functionality to help reduce the carbon footprint of websites.
There are plenty of Kirby developers, so you’re not locked in to continuing to use us.
Sorry, but I don’t recognize any differences in your new version. Your text is geared more towards agencies that want to decide in favour of a CMS. But unfortunately not for customers who will have to work with the CMS later on. There are no convincing arguments that would appeal to me as a customer. Perhaps you should get support with the text design from a copywriter who is familiar with this topic.
I also doubt whether this is the right place to go for marketing support. This forum is primarily about exchanging information on technical questions and problems.
I figure the Kirby v WordPress discussion comes up a lot with potential clients. I hope our points might be of interest to others / be improved, so we all get some great selling points.
If the website is going to be multilingual, having native multilingual support is a great plus compared to having to use plugins like Polylang or WPML.
Maintenance time and costs are also a big factor. Each WP, plugin or theme update can potentially lead to compatibility issues. It’s worth highlighting it as a separate point from security concerns.
Here are some arguments that have worked for us in the past (10+ projects):
Intuitive and customizable user-interface (demonstration of panel helped a lot) => easier and faster content editing, also for less-experienced users
Platform is fast(er) out of the box without additional plugins => good for users of website, supports SEO, less plugin-maintenance
Version updates are easy to perform => helps keeping platform up-to-date and secure at lower running cost
File-based approach makes hosting (find and setup), migration, backups, etc. easy
Plugins in WordPress are both a blessing and a curse => regular updates required to keep website secure, updates often break the websites functionality
Constantly growing, super-supportive and friendly (!) community => problems can be solved quickly if they come up
Some clients also liked that Kirby comes from a company registered in Germany (GmbH).
An issue we’ve had with potential clients is the Kirby license fee v the “free” WordPress.
We’ve cobbled together a bullet point trying to counter this:
• Kirby is a professional product, with a one-off fee. Yet Kirby often works out less expensive. WordPress frequently requires plugins to function, often these have yearly license fees and then ongoing costs of regularly updating and maintaining them.
I can confirm that point based on our experience with WP and Kirby projects.
Operating a website with Kirby is often possible with (much) less effort for the reasons you mentioned, among others. The current 99 to 349 EUR licence costs are therefore amortised within a few months.