We’ve been building WordPress sites for about ten years now, but it might be time to move on. With the Gutenberg page builder, constant need for updates, legal tussles and now AI being shoehorned in to core, it’s just too complex for a lot of sites. Many other ‘content management systems’ (CMS) exist however, so we’ve been testing some out.
Website Carbon Output
The larger the website page size and the more work the server has to do, the higher the carbon output. When we’re trying to make low-carbon sustainable websites, using something as heavy as WordPress doesn’t make any sense. Half the job is turning off the clunky Gutenberg page builder, the AI features and various other questionable ‘features’ that keep getting added.
Grav CMS
Grav is extremely fast and uses way fewer server resources to load a page. The control panel is simpler, with way fewer options. The one thing a lot of clients need however, is a simple way to edit their pages. We populate the site when building it, but small text edits and changes over the months & years after launch should be easy to maintain.
Grav uses ‘markdown’, which is an easy way for developers to set headings, lists etc but less intuitive for clients. Also we design sites in a visual way with various panels of content, not just a big lump of text. So we need a way to allow the adding and reordering of these panels in the admin area.
There is a built in updater in the Grav admin area which makes upgrades easy. It won’t need updating nearly as often as WordPress though, and there is less for hackers to attack.
Choosing a new CMS can be tricky as we can’t predict which ones will prosper over time! Grav is mature with over ten years of development and 15k Github stars however, which can be a good sign of a long term project. It also has an actual business model with their premium themes and plugins, which makes it more likely to survive compared to a free passion project.
Badger Builder for Grav CMS, admin view
Badger Builder – Grav CMS page builder
So to make all this possible, I’m creating a simple page builder called Badger Builder. It has structured panels where text and images can be entered, and then the website displays those nicely on the front end. It will have minimal styles, and allow overriding of the page templates in themes. Extra panels will be easy to add for developers. I want it to be as lightweight as possible and just do one thing. No need for full site editing, font uploads, AI assistants or any of that. Just entering content in a structured way.
Badger Builder is still a work in progress but coming together fast.
Summary
It appears Grav 2 is about ready to launch, so hopefully this summer we will have a simple to use, lower carbon alternative to WordPress available for web design projects. I’ll be moving this site over as well, even though it still has great scores on the ‘website carbon calculator‘ despite running on WordPress!
If moving away from WordPress sounds good – feel free to drop us a line and we can discuss migrating your site to a more eco friendly option.