Choosing a CMS for a small organisation: the honest trade-offs

One of the first questions on a new website project is which content management system to build it on. It’s an important choice, because it shapes how easy the site is to edit, who can look after it and how hard it will be to move later. It’s also a choice that often gets made for the wrong reasons, like whatever the last developer happened to use.

The short version: pick the system that suits the people who will edit the site every week and the people who will maintain it every year. Features matter less than you’d think.

Start with people, not platforms

Before we compare tools, we ask a few plain questions:

• Who will update the site, and how comfortable are they with technology?
• How often does the content change: daily news, monthly events or a few pages a year?
• Who will apply updates, fix things and keep backups once the site is live?
• Do you need anything beyond pages and posts, such as bookings, member areas, a shop or several languages?
• If you parted ways with your developer, could someone else pick up the site easily?

The answers usually narrow the field quickly. A volunteer-run community group with one occasional editor needs something very different from a school with a dozen staff posting news.

The main options

WordPress

WordPress is open source and runs a very large share of the web, which means plenty of developers, hosts and documentation. Its block editor is approachable for most editors, and it can grow from a simple brochure site into something much bigger.

The catch is that its flexibility cuts both ways. A WordPress site built on a heavy theme and a pile of plugins can be slow, fragile and confusing to edit. A WordPress site built with care, using only what it needs, can be light and easy to live with. It also needs regular updates, so someone has to own that job.

Drupal

Drupal is also open source and is strong at structured content, detailed user permissions and complex sites. Larger organisations and government sites often use it for good reason.

For a small organisation it can be more than you need. Development and maintenance generally call for specialist skills, and there are fewer people who can step in if your developer moves on.

Joomla

Joomla sits somewhere between the two, with built-in features like multilingual support. It’s a capable, open-source system, but its community of developers and extensions is smaller than WordPress’s, which can matter when you need help.

Webflow and Framer

Webflow and Framer are hosted platforms: you pay a subscription and they look after the servers, security and updates. Both give designers fine control over layout, and both include a CMS for things like blog posts and team profiles.

They can suit marketing sites well, especially when a designer will be closely involved. The trade-offs are that you’re tied to one company’s pricing and features, moving away later means rebuilding rather than just changing hosts, and extending the site beyond what the platform offers can be limited.

Hosted or self-hosted

A useful way to think about this is who carries the maintenance load. With a hosted platform, the provider handles updates and security, and you accept their rules. With open-source software like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, you own the site and can host it anywhere, including with a green host, but someone has to keep it updated and backed up.

Neither is better in every case. Self-hosting gives you more control and portability. Hosted platforms can mean fewer moving parts for a small team without technical help.

Think about the weight, too

Any of these systems can produce a fast, accessible site, and any of them can produce a slow one. What matters is how it’s built: how many scripts load on every page, how images are handled and whether the templates produce clean, semantic markup. We set a page-weight budget at the start of every project, whatever the platform, because lighter pages load faster on older phones and use less energy on every visit.

Ask whoever is building your site to show you how they’ll keep it accessible and light, not just how it will look.

Our rule of thumb

For most small organisations we work with, a carefully built WordPress site is a sensible default: editors find it familiar, you own it outright and plenty of people can maintain it. We’d suggest something else when:

• The site has complex permissions or structured data that Drupal handles better.
• A designer will run the site and there’s no one to manage updates, which can make a hosted platform the simpler choice.
• The site is so small and static that a full CMS adds more upkeep than value.

Whatever you choose, write down who owns the site, where it’s hosted and how to get your content out. Future you will be grateful.

Where to start

If you’re weighing up platforms for a new site or a rebuild, we’re happy to talk it through, including the options we don’t build with. Have a look at our websites and content management work, or tell us what you’re working on and we’ll give you a straight answer.