Contentful vs WordPress: Understanding When to Use Each

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, choosing the right Content Management System (CMS) is crucial for businesses to manage and deliver their content across various platforms effectively. Two prominent players in this arena are Contentful platform, a headless CMS, and WordPress, a traditional CMS platform. While both systems offer powerful content management capabilities, their respective strengths make them suitable for different use cases. In this blog post, we'll explore the key differences between Contentful and WordPress and help you understand when to use each platform.

Key Differences Between Contentful and WordPress

To understand the strengths and limitations of each CMS, we need to delve into several key aspects:

Feature	WordPress	Contentful
Time to Create & Deploy	Minutes with hosting provider assistance	Longer setup requiring technical skills
Development Costs	Low to none for basic sites, high for complex	High due to the need for custom development
Hosting Costs	Varies from $5/month to higher	Free for basic, additional costs for premium
Content Modeling	Predefined, extensible	Custom models required from scratch
Content Writing	Gutenberg editor, extensible	Rich text and markdown fields
Time to Publish	Immediate (with potential caching delays)	Delay due to the build and deployment process
Speed	Moderate to high with caching and CDN	Typically high due to static content
Flexibility & Extensibility	High with plugins and custom code	Extremely high with an API-driven approach

1. Time Required to Create (and Deploy) a Website

WordPress

Most WordPress hosting platforms allow you to create and deploy a site with little friction. All you need to do is provide answers to some basic questions like the name and domain of the website, and it will take care of the rest for you. You can effectively have a website up and running in as little as 5 minutes.

Contentful

Contentful is a headless CMS, which means that it does not create a website for you in the same way that WordPress does. Contentful provides you with the backend or database, and you need to create the user-facing website using other technologies. This process involves more work than setting up a WordPress website and requires technical skills. You will likely need a programmer or agency to assist you with this.

2. Development Costs

WordPress

As mentioned earlier, creating and deploying a WordPress site is a simple process that involves answering a few questions. There is no need for the average person creating a website in WordPress to incur any development fees. Most of the customization can be performed by yourself. Only in situations where you need complicated customization may you need to involve a software developer.

Contentful

As a headless CMS, Contentful only provides your website's backend. The website's user-facing side (i.e., front-end) will need to be created by yourself. Typically, this involves using technologies like Next.js, Astro, or other contentful development services frameworks and languages. Unless you have the skills yourself or in-house in your company, you must hire an external agency or developer to do this work for you.

3. Hosting Costs

WordPress

For WordPress, hosting fees can vary from around $5 (and lower!) per month to hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on factors like the type of hosting (shared, VPS, dedicated, or managed), the amount of storage and bandwidth provided, the level of customer support, and any additional features like automated backups, security measures, and domain registration.

Contentful

In the case of Contentful, there are two "hosting" fees to consider. The first is the hosting of your website, and the second is the monthly subscription to Contentful. On the low end, you can get by with the free Contentful plan and host your website for free on a host such as Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages.

4. Content Modeling

WordPress

WordPress has a predefined structure to host a website with blog posts (or articles) and pages. This structure already includes taxonomies such as tags, categories, and authors. While WordPress does not require you to define any content types, it gives you the flexibility to create custom content models should the need arise.

Contentful

Contentful does not come with any predefined content model and requires you to define the content model of your website. This requires more work upfront, but it allows you to structure the content model of your website exactly as you require.

5. Content Writing

WordPress

WordPress includes a rich text editor called the Gutenberg editor. The Gutenberg editor is extensible and allows you to install additional blocks via WordPress plugins.

Contentful

Contentful provides a rich text field that allows you to edit rich text content. Contentful also has a long text field that can contain any text but is typically used for markdown content.

Alternative: WordPress and Contentful content editors are not great environments for writing long-form content like blog posts. Because of this, many content writing teams use Google Docs to write the content for their blog posts and then copy the content to WordPress or Contentful. Cloudpress can assist you with exporting your content from Google Docs and Notion to both WordPress and Contentful.

6. Time to Publish Content

WordPress

Since WordPress serves content from a database, any content published is available immediately (with the caveat that if you use a caching plugin or product like Cloudflare, it may take a few seconds or even minutes for the cache to refresh).

Contentful

As a headless CMS, the typical use case for Contentful is to use it with a static site generator. In this case, there is a delay between publishing new content and having it available on the website, as the static site generator must generate the new static HTML pages from the content and upload them to your hosting provider. Typically, you can expect a 1 to 5-minute delay from publishing the content on Contentful to displaying it on your website.

7. Speed

WordPress

WordPress needs to read the content from the database and generate the HTML sent to the user, which causes a small delay when rendering a web page. However, you can improve the speed by adding a caching plugin to WordPress and employing a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Contentful

Considering the standard use case of Contentful (i.e., a static website hosted somewhere like Vercel), you will find that these websites are typically much faster than your average WordPress site, as you serve static HTML content to your website visitors, and hosting providers like Vercel have Content Delivery Networks built-in.

8. Flexibility and Extensibility

WordPress

WordPress allows you to extend its functionality with custom post types, fields, taxonomies, Gutenberg blocks, themes, and more. Customization can be done using third-party plugins, but if these do not fulfill your needs, you can write custom code to extend WordPress.

Contentful

Websites making use of Contentful are infinitely extensible. Since you need to create your front end using technologies such as Next.js, Astro, and others, you are limited only by your imagination. Additionally, Contentful exposes your content via its Content Delivery API, so you can display your content on almost any internet-connected device.

Conclusion

Choosing between Contentful and WordPress ultimately depends on your specific requirements and the nature of your project. Here's a quick breakdown of when you should consider each platform:

When to Use WordPress:

• Ideal for bloggers, small to medium businesses, and those looking to create a traditional website with a blog.
• Best suited for users who want a wide range of themes and plugins for customization without needing extensive technical knowledge.
• Perfect for projects where ease of use, community support, and cost-effectiveness are priorities.

When to Use Contentful:

• Recommended for larger enterprises or projects that require a high degree of customization and scalability.
• Ideal for managing content across multiple digital platforms (websites, apps, IoT devices) due to its contentful benefits and headless CMS architecture.
• Suited for teams looking for a more API-driven approach, offering flexibility to developers to use any programming language or framework.

Whether you choose WordPress or Contentful, both platforms offer robust solutions for managing and delivering content. The key is to match the capabilities of the CMS with the needs of your project, ensuring a seamless and efficient content management experience. For Contentful e-commerce provides a flexible and powerful option to streamline your content workflow.