I’m a WordPress developer, so you probably think I always recommend WordPress over Kirby, right? Wrong! I have sent potential clients who wanted a website over to services like Kirby before, simply because I thought it was a better fit.
Here’s my advice
To make it short, Kirby is great if you need a website with one of the following characteristics:
- Use Kirby instead of WordPress to create a website with 4-5 pages that is simply there because you think that every freelancer, author, professional or company needs a website.
- Use Kirby if you just start out and need something quick.
- Use Kirby if your designer or one of your employees is very familiar with it – then you get a good website without the need to hire a developer.
On the other hand, use WordPress if you want control or customization:
- Use WordPress over Kirby if your website is your business.
- Use WordPress if a considerable amount of business is acquired or delivered through your website.
- Use WordPress if you want to have perfect branding or a very customized look and feel.
- Use WordPress if being in full control of your data and website in general is important to you.
- Use WordPress if you are a company of decent size (with more than 50 employees I would say roughly).
Other Kirby alternatives do exist and might be a better fit for you, make sure to check them out.
If you go for WordPress, make sure you pick the self-hosted version and run it on specialized hosting like Kinsta, don’t use WordPress.com.
If you still have questions, here’s some more information to dive deeper:
The Costs
All things considered, Kirby is probably cheaper when comparing the same website on Kirby and WordPress. You can go super frugal on Kirby and extremely cheap on WordPress, but if you want to do things well, WordPress will cost a bit more.
Having said that, WordPress allows you to incrementally improve your website. With Kirby, you’re limited to whatever Kirby allows you to do. If, at some point, you outgrow Kirby, this one time cost of moving the website to a new platform or WordPress might flip the cost comparison in favour of WordPress.
The Learning Curve
Kirby is easier to learn than WordPress, that’s why I suggest it to clients to build basic websites that exist purely so you can say you have a website.
To learn WordPress properly, you have to invest a bit more time as you need to handle things like domains, hosting, backups and updates on top of actually creating the website.
Ongoing Maintenance
Kirby is a lot less work when it comes to ongoing maintenance compared to WordPress. Updates, hosting and other things are mostly handled by Kirby directly, so you, as a user, don’t have to deal with that.
Being in control of everything in WordPress means that you, unfortunately, also have to handle those things or outsource it to a WordPress specialist.
WordPress Themes vs Kirby Templates
Nobody can match the amount of niche themes that are available for WordPress. Having said that, you only need one good one for your website, so total number is not the metric to go by.
The good thing with Kirby is, that the templates there have gone through some quality control, and you can simply plug them in and go.
With WordPress, you have to do your own research and pick based on that. The upside here, however, is that you can customize your theme to become and look like whatever you want, which is always limited to some extent on platforms like Kirby.
How Good is Kirby SEO Compared to WordPress?
This is hard to say, as Google changes what it likes so frequently nowadays. Kirby is definitely decent when it comes to SEO, it will always get you at least 80% there.
If you do, however, want to highly customize your articles to fit the latest SEO trends or you want to make SEO one of you key acquisition channels, WordPress is clearly the way to go.
Is Kirby Good for E-commerce?
Kirby might be alright for some use cases, but in general I suggest most clients to pick Shopify for e-commerce websites. WordPress here is in a similar boat in that Shopify in 9 out of 10 cases is probably the better alternative.
If you want ot learn more about why that is, check out my Shopify vs WordPress review for more information.
Is Kirby Good for Blogging?
In my opinion, nothing beats WordPress when it comes to blogging. So, if you are serious about creating a blog, use WordPress.
To test if you are serious about blogging, write the first 20 articles of your blog on your computer first.
If you can do that, you should be able to keep it up in the long run and you can start creating your WordPress website.
If not, then you saved yourself some time and money.
Conclusion
Kirby is great to get started or to simply have a basic presence on the web where customers can find the information they need to either get in touch with you or to find your physical shop or office.
Self-hosted WordPress is more complex but probably the safer long-term play if you want to have a website where you are in full control of your data, that you can move around different hosting providers, where you have various backup options and peace of mind and which is fully customizable with a wide range of themes, plugins and experts.
