Why We Built Our Website With Wagtail

As an agency, we’re always looking for the best solution to meet the needs of our clients.

In the web design and development space, this means ensuring that our clients adopt technologies and web solutions that not only meet their current requirements, but will stand the test of time and serve them well into the future as well.

That’s why we’re big fans of building websites with Wagtail, a Content Management System (CMS) that offers a great admin experience, high security, and the flexibility to grow in scale and functionality as your brand and business needs evolve.

For us, it’s important to practise what we preach. So in early 2023, we decided to migrate our own agency website over to Wagtail as well.

A little history about our website

Prior to migrating to Wagtail, our website had undergone a number of platform changes. Originally, we’d built our website on Webflow, a popular no-code website builder that we started to encounter several recurring frustrations and quickly outgrew. By this time, we had started adopting Wagtail as our platform of choice for our client website projects, and with a long-term goal of moving ourselves over to Wagtail too, decided to replatform to Squarespace as a temporary intermediate solution as it allowed us a certain amount of flexibility over content and design that Webflow restricted.

The challenges with Webflow

Webflow is known for its design flexibility and ease of use, but it can also become limiting for a growing business like ours. Here are some of the common frustrations we experienced:

Complexity in customising

While Webflow’s design capabilities are impressive, the process of customising the site is overly complex and often requires heavy developer input. So for us as a small, busy team, this resulted in frustrations with design and content admin experience because development times were considerably longer than we thought necessary, even utilising our in-house web developers.

Limitations in scalability

Webflow can become limiting as a business grows and needs to scale its website. We’ve seen this with other clients and we saw it ourselves too. This inevitably results in the need for a more complex and time-consuming migration process down the line.

Lack of functionality

Webflow has limited built-in functionality and requires the use of external plugins and integrations to add features like e-commerce and advanced form functionality.

The temporary advantages of Squarespace

Squarespace is a fantastic choice for small businesses looking to establish an online presence quickly and easily. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, beautiful templates, and robust hosting, Squarespace allows business owners to create a professional-looking website without needing to know how to code.

Ease of use

Squarespace’s user-friendly interface made it easy for our content-authoring team to make updates and changes to the site.

Design flexibility

Squarespace offers a variety of design templates and customisation options, allowing for a visually appealing site without the need for advanced technical skills.

Affordable pricing

Squarespace’s pricing model is straightforward and affordable, making it a cost-effective solution for small to medium-sized businesses.

There are many advantages to using Squarespace. However, as your business grows and your needs become more complex, you may find that Squarespace's functionality starts to become limiting. That’s the experience we had - we wanted more from our website.

That's where Wagtail comes in. As a powerful and flexible open-source CMS, Wagtail offers unparalleled control over your website's design, functionality, and content management.

Whether you're looking to integrate custom features, optimise for SEO, or manage large volumes of content, Wagtail's modular architecture and extensive set of tools make it an ideal solution for businesses that are looking to scale and achieve more robust solutions.

So while Squarespace is an excellent choice for small businesses, those who want to take their online presence to the next level should consider making the move to Wagtail.

Why Wagtail is the best platform for our agency

Ultimately, we chose to build our new website using Wagtail because it offers the perfect balance of flexibility, functionality, and scalability, meaning we can build a website reflective of our brand story. Here are some of the key benefits we’ve experienced thus far:

Customization

Wagtail’s open-source architecture allows for extensive customisation and development, giving our team the freedom to create the exact site we need.

Scalability

Wagtail is designed for scalability, allowing for easy growth and expansion as our business grows.

User-friendly interface

Wagtail’s user-friendly interface makes it easy for our content-authoring team to manage and maintain content on the site.

Built-in functionality

Wagtail offers a variety of built-in functionality, including advanced forms, A/B testing, customisable workflows, revision rollbacks, scheduling, customisable page types, and more, reducing the need for external plugins and integrations.

We’re excited to have adopted Wagtail as our CMS of choice. It’s a platform that allows us to provide the best possible solution for our clients, especially for those looking invest in a robust web solution to grow and evolve their online presence.

Whatever your brand, marketing or website requirements, we’re keen to chat! Our full-stack web development team is experienced across a range of different technologies and builds websites of all shapes and sizes. Get in touch.