WordPress powers over 30% of websites globally. It's popular for making blog-style websites easy for semi-technical web designers. But, for high-performance, scalable, and complex sites, with richer functionality, WordPress falls short. Using plugins and themes adds complexity and security risks. It can also slow performance. So, it's a poor choice for websites needing more than basic functionality.
Blaze is a modern hybrid 'headless' CMS. It solves issues for high-performing, functional and content-rich websites. Blaze, built on a cutting-edge JavaScript technology stack, overcomes many WordPress limitations. It empowers site and content creators with 'no-code' development. It also cuts reliance on agencies and tech experts. It optimises performance, SEO, scalability and security. Blaze enables content personalisation and also the creation and sharing of rich first-party engagement data. It also enables complex web apps and data exchanges, within the digital ecosystem.
Why WordPress Isn’t Suitable for Advanced Websites
WordPress started as a blogging platform. It has since added more features. But, its core architecture is 'monolithic.' The frontend and backend are closely integrated and rely on each other completely. This is inflexible and makes changes and scaling difficult, as requirements grow in complexity. WordPress relies on third-party plugins for anything more than blogging. This causes performance issues and security risks. Plugins often interact badly together, lack support or become outdated. This adds to the support and maintenance burden.
Blaze's hybrid 'headless' architecture separates content from its Single Page Application (SPA) frontend, built in ReactJS. Unlike other purely 'headless' CMS systems, Blaze installs an App in the browser faster than a traditional web page can render. Using Facebook backed technologies, App like performance is now possible in the web browser. Blaze CMS allows users to configure the App from the Page-Builder interfaces, in the CMS. The GraphQL API app serves data to connected systems, like the front-end website. It gives Blaze much better speed and efficiency. This gives Blaze users flexibility, scalability, and performance. They can also micro-personalise content for users. Blaze sites can have personalised, multi-format and multimedia content, with complex relationships and blended listings. These complex websites can scale and perform in ways that WordPress just cannot support.
WordPress requires developers to create similar searchable listings and directories. As a 'no code' solution, Blaze does not. Non-technical users can create, configure, manage, clone, and extend complex multimedia content listings, at will.
Plugins: WordPress’s Achilles Heel
Plugins are integral to expanding a WordPress site’s functionality. But, plugins introduce significant problems. Each plugin is developed independently. Many are poorly maintained. Others are incompatible with each other or with new WordPress updates. This causes functional, performance and security risks. Adding more plugins increases the chance of site issues. Managing these complexities requires help from multiple developers.
The Blaze plugin library is centrally managed and quality controlled. A suite of advanced testing tools helps maintain quality, performance, and display across devices and browsers. These tools test performance, quality, and run end-to-end and visual regressions tests. Blaze uses Snyk, Dependabot, Codecov, Sentry, Jest, Playwright, and BrowserStack to test its core framework and plugins for quality and performance. This boosts performance and ensures security, stability, and interoperability as Blaze evolves. It does so without the overhead of managing multiple developer plugins.
Flexibility and Content Control
WordPress has a rigid content structure. It treats all pages like blog posts, which is the default. This limits flexibility. Customising content beyond this requires extensive work with themes and plugins. This slows down development and adds significant costs. Themes and plugins are also rigid and opinionated, reducing a user's ability to customise the look and feel.
Blaze's Page-Builder lets editors create custom layouts and manage rich media, from the outset. Blaze is designed for managing a high level of content sophistication. Users can build complex, searchable, multimedia content, product and directory relations and display, without coding. It lets non-technical users create complex web designs and interactive experiences. They can do this quickly, without the technical overhead. Styling is managed independently. It is accessible to non-tech users to configure and update. Web designers can also style the site and components independently, using Sass.
Performance and Speed
Blaze's tech stack — NodeJS, ReactJS, GraphQL, MongoDB, and ElasticSearch — beats WordPress on performance. Blaze uses Server Side Rendering (SSR), Redis, Apollo caching, and AWS CloudFront. These serve optimised 'pages' in the front-end Single Page Application. They deliver fast performance without requiring page reloads as users navigate the site. Blaze is also ‘cloud native’, using elastic, serverless computing to scale independent microservices to meet demand, precisely when it is required. This maintains speed and performance under any load. without any additional cost for unused server capacity. Additionally, ‘on demand’ development and staging environments can be provisioned only when required, again reducing cost.
While WordPress can be made to perform well, it requires many plugins to be functional. Plugins add complexity and reduce speed. Plugins can be risky. They can harm security and user experience, especially under high traffic or when performance is critical. WordPress hosting is also provisioned using traditional servers, or virtualised servers. By comparison this is inherently inefficient, as server capacity has to be provisioned manually in advance, to an estimation of traffic. This is why WordPress sites are particularly brittle, when it comes to increasing or spiking traffic, or DDOS attacks.
Blaze’s architecture is optimised from the ground up for speed and flexibility, making it ideal for websites that require high performance and scalability, without compromising functionality.
Front-End Personalisation and Data Capabilities
Blaze's architecture, speed, and performance enable it to deliver personalised content at scale. This is not possible in the 'static', cached, fixed pages of WordPress. They serve the same, static and templated content and media to every user.
Blaze’s front-end application allows for real-time rendering of content and media within every component on-page. Each part of the page can be customised for each user, without reloading the entire page. This level of micro-personalisation sets a new standard in website delivery. It is enabled by the application front-end running in the web browser and the GraphQL API back-end, serving data efficiently. Tailored user experiences are now achievable in content marketing, driving engagement and conversion
With Snowplow (or similar platforms) in the tech stack, we can collect and process first-party data. Snowplow is a powerful analytics and behavioural Data Management Platform (DMP). Data collection is configured within Page-Builder, creating detailed audience segments based on behaviour, engagement and preferences around content and media. The Blaze data layer surfaces content and engagement data. Engagement data is accessible via the front-end, using Google Tag Manager, or on the server side, for increased performance and privacy. With Snowplow in the stack, Blaze lets marketers analyse user behaviour in real-time. This boosts content targeting effectiveness and audience development on and off site. Targeting and personalisation can be achieved by topic engagement, geography, demography or even by a company's IP data.
This is vital as third-party cookies are phased out by Big Tech companies, like Google. It makes Blaze ideal for privacy-focused businesses, especially publishers and retailers. They want to develop audience insights and deliver targeted content to larger, highly targeted audiences.
Security Considerations
WordPress’s security issues are well documented, with over 51,000 current, known vulnerabilities. Many of these stem from poorly maintained plugins and third-party themes. The decentralised development of WordPress core, themes, and plugins makes it hard to manage and patch security flaws. This worsens the issue and the number of vulnerabilities is increasing fast.
Blaze uses a continuous deployment, testing and integration model. It integrates security updates via GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline. Automated security monitoring manages security centrally. It uses GitHub's dependency graph and advisory database. It also uses the OWASP Foundation's vulnerability database. Code quality is managed using Snyk and Codecov. JavaScript library dependencies are managed using Dependabot. This helps Blaze users identify risks and manage tech stack dependencies efficiently. Continuous integration, delivery, and testing tools help Blaze users receive updates quickly, on-going. Blaze is a much more secure solution than WordPress.
SEO and Performance Edge
SEO in WordPress needs plugins. They can be hard to manage and optimise. WordPress has well-known issues with URL canonicalisation, performance, and large CSS theme files. There are also problems with crawlability and poor on-page optimization.
Blaze has SEO best practices built in. It includes dynamic sitemaps, schema.org templates, metadata and graph data management and programmatic content optimisation. Blaze's system boosts page speed, a key factor in SEO rankings. One main benefit, though, is that Page-Builder lets content managers categorise and show relationships between different content types. Showing website visitors the breadth and depth of content is also very effective for SEO. Blaze is built and tested for mobile-first use and indexing. This ensures fast, responsive performance on all devices, a key determinant for search ranking.
MACH and Jamstack Architecture Vs WordPress Monolithic Legacy
Blaze uses MACH architecture: it uses Microservices, is API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. It offers flexibility, performance, and scalability. Each component of the Blaze platform can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This offers big advantages over WordPress's monolithic structure.
MACH architecture lets Blaze enable faster development and easier third-party integrations. It can also scale on demand during traffic spikes or when new features are needed.
Blaze is a Jamstack solution too (JavaScript, APIs, & Markup). It has a JavaScript SIngle Page Application front-end. Jamstack architecture optimise performance by pre-rendering assets. Blaze delivers content efficiently, via GraphQL APIs. This architecture reduces server load and speeds up content and data delivery. Blaze also serves pre-compiled JavaScript files through AWS CloudFront. This ensures faster page loads.
WordPress's reliance on server-side processing for each page request slows it down. It is less efficient and harder to scale. In WordPress, everything runs on the server for each user interaction. This includes page generation and plugin execution. It creates bottlenecks under heavy load, which require manual, or semi-automated provisioning of additional servers, or server resources. This is an outdated approach to meeting performance and scaling goals.
Technical Debt
WordPress’s legacy code and reliance on plugins create substantial technical debt. The new JavaScript Gutenberg Editor is a step forward and one in the direction of a progressive, JavaScript based technology approach. But, it hasn't fixed the issues, or replaced the legacy. It has also caused 'breaking changes' for many themes and plugins. The Gutenberg Editor is reported as not being well-received by the WordPress community.
Blaze uses modern development practices, including automated testing and code quality control. It runs in a continuous integration and deployment environment. This avoids technical debt. It lets Blaze evolve without the risks and limits of WordPress.
Conclusions
For users of content management systems, Blaze is better than WordPress. It offers a sophisticated site with rich, multi-format content and media publishing. Users get a scalable, high-performance, secure, and flexible solution. It comes from progressive technology, modern architecture, and rich functionality. WordPress's reliance on plugins and outdated, vulnerable architecture make it unsuitable for sophisticated business-critical and transactional websites.
Richer, more sophisticated, functional and better performing sites are built with Blaze. They are nowadays created and maintained by non-technical stakeholders, using 'no code' site development. This is far beyond what WordPress can deliver, even with the developer overhead, time and cost.
Blaze is the CMS platform for serious web publishers and content marketers.