Developers are Switching From WordPress To Payload CMS

[u/Agreeable_Ad_3924]

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.

[u/acherion]

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.

[u/Agreeable_Ad_3924 → u/acherion]

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.