Matt Gillman Matt Gillman

Which CMS should I use?

Which CMS (Content Management System) should I use? Squarespace or WordPress? Shopify or Drupal? Webflow maybe?

It can be a confusing choice, but it depends on your end goal. What are you trying to achieve? You don’t need a Ferarri if you only drive to church on Sundays, and a Toyota Camry won’t cut it in F1.

We have been using Squarespace a lot lately and it kind of started by accident, I never expected it to be such a capable tool - you can read more about how that happened here.

I can see a bright future in Squarespace, but it’s not suitable for all scenarios.

Creating forms on Squarespace is fiddly and not very good. That said, it is effortless to use a tool such as Hubspot and embed the form directly into Squarespace.

Squarespace doesn’t have a “Revision History” feature as WordPress does, so if you have a lot of users editing your site it’s not going to work well, and you’re in danger of losing content which is not much fun.

Squarespace is so much easier to use than WordPress though, it’s point and click and very easy to change things whilst still being limited to the site styles (fonts, colour palette), so you don’t need to worry if the intern prefers Purple Comic Sans.

WordPress or Squarespace?


A lot of the time it comes down to what you know and what you are familiar using and many people have grown up with WordPress and it’s quick and easy for them to update their site.

WordPress needs to be maintained regularly, WordPress code and Plug-ins which can take a lot of time. It also breaks. I would say 10% of the time when upgrading WordPress and Plugins something will break.

If you are just focusing on selling I would use Shopify. If you are a government agency or a publisher I would look at Drupal.

Having the right tool is important but it’s not everything. Coming from a music background I used to get stuck on what DAW I should be using, Logic or ProTools, or what are the best software synths and I would spend hours comparing them when in hindsight I should have spent more time just writing music.

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