The Statamic Shift

We’ve been a WordPress shop for almost as long as we’ve been a shop.

The blog you’re reading right now runs on WordPress. Most of our portfolio runs on WordPress. As an agency, we have well over two decades of experience with it, and we’re not done with it.

But like anyone living in an era of rapidly evolving technology, including the elephant in the room called Artificial Intelligence, we are committed to staying nimble and continuing to offer our clients the right tool for the job.

That doesn’t mean we take on something new lightly. Before any platform earns a spot in our toolbox for client work, we put it through the wringer: security, long-term support, hosting, maintainability, the works. We don’t build a client’s site on a CMS until we’re fully confident it can meet our high expectations for quality, scalability, and manageability.

More and more, lately, we’re finding that WordPress isn’t always the best answer. (It is still the right answer a lot of the time, so we aren’t abandoning it!) Instead, with increasing frequency, the tool we’re reaching for in our toolbox is a CMS called Statamic.

We want to tell you why now, after all these years.

How we got here

Here’s the thing WordPress does really, really well: it lets you build fast.

Gutenberg gives you a page builder. Plugins give you other people’s code, already written and already tested. When a client comes to us with a real-world budget and needs forty pages, a custom design, and a handful of features, WordPress has been the right choice. Every hour we didn’t spend reinventing a wheel was an hour we could spend on the things that actually move the needle for a client: design, copy, UX, custom functionality, etc. 

That was the right call. We’d make it again.

But the speed came with a pretty specific physical shape. Gutenberg is blocky. A group, with columns inside it, with content inside those. Fast to assemble, but at the end of the day, it looks like what it is: boxes.

We got around these constraints in two ways. We asked our designers to design around Gutenberg’s limitations. And when a design demanded something the box model couldn’t do, a developer would build a fully custom block: hand-code the markup, wire up the fields, bind the data. Beautiful results? Yes. Real labor? Very much so. Which meant we had to ration them, because every custom block on a tight budget chipped away at precious resources.

Then there was content porting. Moving a client’s existing content into a new WordPress build meant touching every block on every page, by hand. Unless we had savvy clients who could assist with content porting, we needed to allocate a frustrating amount of time to this very manual part of the process. 

Statamic never had those constraints

Statamic isn’t new. It’s been around since 2012, it just shipped version 6 in January, and it’s built on Laravel, the most popular PHP backend framework on GitHub. We already reach for Laravel whenever a project grows past “website” into “application.” One of our developers recently built a native mobile app on it. Same language as WordPress, same ecosystem we already live in. The pieces were all familiar, and we’d been experimenting with the platform for awhile.

One of the main reasons for our curiosity is that with Statamic, there are no boxes. There’s no page builder telling you what a section can be. Our developers work directly in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the actual building blocks of the web. So if a designer dreams up an overlapping, animated, breaks-all-the-rules layout, or wants the page to move and respond as you scroll, we can build exactly that. Nothing gets lost in translation between the design and the finished site.

And the whole site lives in the file system. Content, templates, settings, blueprints, all of it in plain files instead of a database. That comes with real benefits the Statamic team explains better than we can: it’s version-controlled in Git, it removes the database attack surface entirely, and most of what WordPress needs a plugin for ships in the core, built by one team.

So why didn’t we switch years ago?

Because all of that flexibility was hand-typed. No drag-and-drop means someone writes every line. Statamic says it plainly: it’s a developer-forward CMS. All that boilerplate, the scaffolding, the markup, the configuration, needed to be touched by a developer. And our clients’ budgets couldn’t cover that by-hand touch. WordPress’s shortcuts won, every time.

Then the price collapsed

We wrote in April that AI has made the grinding middle of a build dramatically faster. Scaffolding, boilerplate, migrations, first drafts. That’s exactly the part of Statamic that used to be too expensive.

And here’s the part that feels almost like a happy accident: because everything in Statamic is a file, AI is unusually good at building it. All the repetitive setup work, the site’s structure, its settings, its page templates, and most importantly its content, is just files an AI can read and write. So the content porting that used to be an budget-busting process? Automated now. The custom sections we used to ration? We don’t have to ration them anymore.

With AI doing the grunt work, we can build a fully custom Statamic site faster than we can drag blocks around a page builder.

AI isn’t doing any of the designing here. It has no taste, doesn’t know your audience, and can’t tell you what to cut or what to fight for, that’s still on us, and it’s still what you’re paying for. What we’ve done is put AI to work exactly where it belongs: in development, automating the repetitive, reliably-automatable parts of a build that we can check and verify ourselves. Every hour that saves on the dev side is an hour that goes back into design and strategy.

Here’s what that means for you

It used to be that a typical budget bought a custom homepage, maybe two custom interior pages, and the rest of the site was assembled from existing blocks. 

That math is gone with Statamic. Your designer gets breathing room. Every page can get real design attention. The ambitious version of your site, the one that used to get trimmed in scoping, fits inside the same budget. We meant it in April: ambition is affordable again. Statamic is a big part of how.

So where does that leave WordPress?

Right where it’s always been: in the toolbox. Some projects still fit it perfectly, and when they do, we’ll recommend it without hesitation. Three decades of experience doesn’t evaporate because we learned something new.

What’s changed is that WordPress is no longer our default. It’s a choice. Two great tools, one honest recommendation, based on what your project actually needs.

That’s really the role we want to play for you: a partner who’s done the homework on available tools and will tell you plainly which one gets you the best outcome for your budget. If you’re weighing WordPress against something newer for your next project, that’s a conversation we’re always glad to have.

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