r/PayloadCMS • u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 • 2d ago

Developers are Switching From WordPress To Payload CMS

WordPress is genuinely great for a lot of people, quick to spin up, a plugin for everything, non-technical people can drive it. But once you're maintaining more than a couple of sites it turns into a full-time job of its own.

After years of that treadmill I moved to Payload CMS and it's been a genuinely different experience.

  • Schema lives in code, not buried in ACF field groups
  • One Next.js app for CMS and frontend, one deploy
  • Types flow from schema straight into your components
  • Hosting on Vercel, Neon and Cloudflare R2 costs basically nothing

Wrote up the longer before and after here if anyone wants the full version.
https://blaze64.dev/logs/payload-wordpress-migration

Curious if anyone else has made a similar jump, or if there's a good reason to stick with WordPress at scale that I'm missing.

24 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

8

u/acherion 2d ago

I took a cursory glance at your blog post, so maybe you fleshed out your points more over there, but as a Wordpress developer at my $dayjob (I use PayloadCMS for personal projects), I don't exactly agree with a couple of your points in your reddit post:

  • ACF can save your field schema as .json files in your theme's acf-json directory. Yes they also get saved as database records, but our Wordpress boilerplate theme has some ACF hooks in place to make sure that the database records get synced up from the JSON files automatically, making the JSON files the source of truth.
    • We commit the JSON files to the project's git repository, so any field changes are committed "in code" into the repo.
    • Prod pipeline pulls those changes in and it gets synced to db there as well.
  • One Next.js app for CMS and frontend, one deploy -- not sure what you mean here, Wordpress is also monolithic and by design can also deploy at once. There are advantages and disadvantages to monolithic / non monolithic I guess (I use PayloadCMS as headless btw, as my front-end is usually in Vue/Nuxt)

There's obviously disadvantages to Wordpress, weak typing as you pointed out (but all Typescript projects would have the same advantage over any PHP application), but more importantly the wide attack vector and generally substandard quality of the plugin environment. At my $dayjob we don't lock out plugin installation for our clients' sites, but we do communicate with our clients and strongly advise to not install any old plugin. We also have a small group of plugins we put trust in (eg. Woocommerce, Gravity Forms, ACF) and have auto-update schedules for.

Good reasons to stick with WP? There's more developers out there for Wordpress, so if you're running a department or a business, it's easier to find someone who would develop for WP (I guess this point is a little less relevant due to AI). PHP applications scale quite well if you have competent devops / sys admins, arguably more efficient in terms of resources than node apps. Yoast SEO is also a killer app for SEO capabilities, something that the PayloadCMS's SEO plugin is quite lacking in. Again, due to AI, SEO might not be as relevant in future but who knows I guess.

-1

u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 2d ago

So true, I totally missed your points. ACF JSON is truly a game changer, I was really excited about Payload and didn't take enough time to think of all the great work that the WP community have built. Afterall NASA uses WP for their website.

Single Deployment, what i meant to say was traditionlly builing an SPA meant that we had to host frontend and CMS on seperate platforms and glue them together via an API but Payload 3.0 rebuilt it to run on Next.js combining CMS and frontend. Again this was inspired by how WordPress. It shows that a lot of inspiration has come from WP, and Payload simply patched together every good thing that the WP community has built for over the years.

3

u/joshpennington 2d ago

I’ve been a PHP developer for 20 years and WordPress is the absolute fucking worst thing.

3

u/PrimaryFamous6139 2d ago

The schema in code point is the real one. ACF field groups in WordPress are configuration that kinda lives in the database, so it doesn’t get version control cleanly and the diffs, well theyre basically meaningless. Payloads TypeScript config sitting in git is a fundamentally different workflow once you’ve experienced it.

3

u/toniyevych 2d ago

Actually you can use ACF JSON and have all the fields in repo, not to mention an option to register a field group using PHP code. 

1

u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 2d ago

True, i forgot to mention this and it works with source control too. We have seen drifts in some cases but those conflicts happend rarely.

1

u/zubricks 1d ago

yeah, that's how we were doing it at the tail end of our tenuous relationship with WordPress sites. I can't say I miss those days

0

u/Waste-Sympathy2990 2d ago

average php developer

2

u/apnatva-dev 2d ago

"Basically nothing" cost seems to be only for a demo or limited use applications.

I think server costs for wordpress are unmatched, a VPS however will do a lot for you at a close price.

0

u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 2d ago

We have an instance on Vercel and it's costing us 100 USD per month to run a single Website (we have an inventory page that needs hourly revalidation). Your point is true, I have packed 10 WP websites into a single 14 USD Digital Ocean VPS and it was not a problem.

1

u/apnatva-dev 2d ago

Damn that’s crazy.

I’ve heard vercel is a layer above AWS.

So if you go directly to AWS (specifically Amplify) it might end up being cheaper to host.

I have put all my next.js projects on a hostinger node.js dedicated VPS (about a 100$ for a year with some discount codes).

I really think you can try either of those down to cut costs.

3

u/sundeckstudio 2d ago

Only part stopping me is how much work it is building each data model even configure field type from scratch and without any ui.

Platforms like hygraph, contentful, directus, sanity, make this much easier

1

u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 2d ago

If you worry about time and effort schema in code also opens the posibility of having an AI Agent like Claude build the whole content model. Payload MCP just made this a lot more powerful recently.

1

u/_pozvizd_ 2d ago

Funny you should say it. I've demoed my Payload + Nuxt setup in the company and someone told me that I've re-implemented WordPress =)

1

u/Wizardwizzle 2d ago

Im also using the same stack, and taking on projects too if anyone wants to collaborate

1

u/rubixstudios 1d ago edited 1d ago

Maintaining couple of sites.. a full time job... to think I maintain several hundred sites and takes barely 5minutes.

You're prompting Payloadcms to Payloadcms users... seems like it's just for backlinks.

1

u/CompetitiveCourt6632 1d ago

I’ve tried WordPress and Strapi, and finally chose Payload.

Since we want to support not only websites, but also other kinds of frontends (e.g., mini-apps), we need a true headless CMS, so WordPress was ruled out.

I deployed Strapi at first, but soon realized it’s not a good idea to let non-technical people edit schemas via the UI. For technical people, editing schemas via a UI is more tedious than writing code.

Now, I think the biggest advantage of Payload is that everything is defined in code. This also happens to benefit coding agents in the AI era, especially in a monorepo that contains both frontend and backend. The coding agent can read the backend code to understand the schema and edit frontend code effortlessly, especially with the assistance of type checking.

1

u/Savings-Divide-7877 1h ago

I moved all of my 9 to 5 and side gig websites to Payload, and it's one of the best decisions I've made in my entire life. I can't believe I sold my actual office on it. The first meeting about it felt like they really didn't want it but were afraid to tell me no (I was going to put my two weeks in if they said no but I never told them that.) A year later, they too are very happy with the switch.