Any CMS Alternatives to WordPress?

[Nonbeardedman]

TL;DR is at the end

I'm sure it's me as I've seen many people use WordPress with ease but for me personally, it's been anything but "beginner-friendly" or "intuitive"

Almost every month consistently ever since I switched from Blogger to WordPress my site seems to be getting flagged for some kind of technical issue - something I'm no expert in. Changing a minor thing or even not changing anything at all gets me some issues.

Like here's some problems I've been recently facing, and once I fix one of these another shows up:

• Random spam links start appearing every week or so from Blogger although I've already 301 redirected all my links from the old Blogger site to the WordPress site. The links also seem to generate newer links, like if I redirect the link "olddomain.com/page-1" to "newdomain.com/page-1", Google Search Console will recrawl the site and then detect some new broken link like "olddomain.com/page-1/olddomain". I'll redirect those links as well and then it detects other broken links to the point it almost feels like trolling
• Theme issues. I've had so many of these. When I first started I chose the WordPress Twenty-Twenty Two theme. I designed the site properly using the site editor. However, I later found out that whenever I got into a technical issue or I wanted to add something in the back-end (like 3rd party javascript code) the Block themes had a totally different layout than the regular themes. And most of the tutorials online were for the old themes' layout. Out of exhaustion I just removed the theme and shifted to Astra
• Astra for the longest time was a shitshow. I had to install a plugin to do literally anything, then when I updated the theme it wiped away all the code I had added. This was my bad, cuz I later read here on BuSo that you're supposed to install a child theme to do those edits.
• Due to installing a bunch of plugins to make Astra functional, my site speed dropped bad. So I thought maybe I should get a theme that has the proper features, so I went with Kadence.
• Kadence, even the free version, worked great and had everything I needed so I designed my site properly (on a staging server as I had learned from my mistakes). It worked great for like 3 days and now whenever I try to visit my site it either has broken CSS, shows "Origin Error", or just flat out takes forever to load - and I'm not talking about the site, I'm saying things like when I click "Edit Post", it takes a solid 2-3 mins just to open the post editor and then its functionality is also choppy
• Other than theme issues, I'm having GSC reporting all sorts of issues I never had to deal with on Blogger. This includes Indexing issues, mobile usability issues, and other weird things like "clickable elements to close together" but when I check there's nothing there.

I know this sounds more like a rant but I would really appreciate some help. I just need my site to be consistenly running so that I could just focus on the writing and promotion part. I'm sure there might be something messed up with the cPanel server or something, but idk really know how to navigate that.

If anyone has any advice or a link to a guide to get WP properly up and running, I'd appreciate that too, but rn the options I see in front of me are:

1. Install a fresh copy of WP on the domain and import only the written content (posts)
2. Move to an alternative CMS that gives me a nice balance between control and beginner-friendliness

I also don't mind losing a bit of traffic if it means I'll have a reliable system in place in the long-term. I've already gotten hit 30% (and still going) for most traffic, and I also plan on removing a lot of the posts that aren't aligning with my audience and niche. What I mostly want to know is that if there are any better and reliable CMSs out there (without any hidden costs or something like that) and the risks of moving to a new CMS - as well as some things to keep in mind

TL;DR: Frustrated with WP due to diffiulty navigating technical bugs and glitches that are out of my domain of expertise. Wish to move forward with a new CMS and hoping to learn about the risk behind such a drastic decision.

I might also need to add what kind of features I plan on implementing on the site:

1. A way to sell my ebooks, so like an online checkout or something
2. Ways to grow my email list, so pop-ups and newsletter forms
3. Two main content sections including a "blog section" and a "guides section"
4. Ability to create the main supporting pages like Home, About, Privacy Policy, etc.

I've been looking into Ghost and it seems nice, so wanted to hear your guys' advice before jumping into something recklessly

 

[Lrjordan]

I asked this same question on Twitter/X recently and a couple of really smart people messaged with the same advice: stick with WordPress.

WordPress is really easy to use but it sounds like you've had some strange errors that people don't typically have. The fact you were able to add code (despite it unfortunately getting removed) means you already have more expertise in the domain than 80% of WP users.

Know this isn't the answer you were looking for, but it could be worth trying again - and trying to forget about the previous errors, whilst working through them.

 

[Nonbeardedman]

Thanks for the reply but I managed to free up some time to learn Hugo, a static site generator.

My requirements with the site weren't that over the top that I couldn't do with a static site, so I thought of migrating.

I mentioned it in my case study as well, that the main reason for switching was mainly hosting costs, speed and scalability.

Although I believe that WP would be better for scalability, the other factors weighed heavily enough for me to make the shift. I've managed to create a basic site, migrate some of the content, and even got it hosted for free on Cloudflare Pages