A website is only as good as its most recent update. The CMS question is really a question about who will maintain the site, how often, and with how much technical help. Pick for that, not for a feature list.
Be honest about who updates the site
A marketing team that publishes weekly needs a different tool from a founder who edits a page twice a year. If non-technical people will make changes, the editing experience matters more than almost anything else. If updates are rare and go through a developer anyway, you have more freedom.
The common options, roughly
Hosted website builders
Fast to start, low maintenance, limited when you need something specific. Good for small marketing sites where the team values independence over flexibility.
Traditional CMS platforms
A large ecosystem and familiar editing model, but they need ongoing security updates and can accumulate plugins that slow the site and create risk. Fine with discipline; a liability without it.
Headless CMS
The content lives in a dedicated editing tool and the site is built separately. This gives excellent performance and flexibility, and clean content that can feed multiple channels. It costs more to set up and needs a developer relationship to evolve.
Custom / flat-content
For sites that change rarely, storing content in structured files and rebuilding on change is simple, fast, secure and cheap to host. Not suitable if the team needs to publish without a developer.
Questions that decide it
- How often does content actually change, and who changes it?
- Do we need to publish the same content to other channels (app, newsletter, partners)?
- How much ongoing maintenance are we willing to pay for?
- What happens if the person who set it up leaves?
In short
Match the CMS to your update habits and your appetite for maintenance, not to a demo. We help teams make this call as part of building the site — tell us how your team works and we will recommend the lightest option that fits.