Why I build websites with Kirby CMS
People often ask me this: "Why don't you use WordPress?" It's a fair question. WordPress powers something like 40% of the web, clients have heard of it, and there's no shortage of developers who know their way around it. But after more than 20 years of building websites, I've come to think that popular isn't the same as right – and for the kind of work I do, WordPress has never really suited me. I build almost everything with Kirby CMS. This is the story of how I got there.
Where I started
I began building websites the way most developers of my generation did – with static HTML and CSS. No CMS, no database, just files. It was straightforward and fast, but handing a static site over to a client who needed to update their own content was always a problem waiting to happen.
Perch CMS solved that. It was a small content management system – lightweight, flexible, and particularly good at adding content management to existing static sites. The community around it was active and genuinely helpful. It felt less like using a product and more like being part of something.
Then the developers sold the project to a company. They reassured users that development would continue under new ownership, but it didn't. Communication dried up almost immediately, and forum activity slowed to nothing. Standard Perch was quietly discontinued. The only way to carry on was to migrate to Perch Runway – a more advanced version of Perch – and sign up for a monthly subscription without support.
The community evaporated. I found myself managing a number of client sites built on a CMS that felt increasingly like abandoned software. It was an uncomfortable position to be in.
Kirby came up on the Perch forum itself, in the threads where people were discussing what to do next. Someone mentioned it, then a few others did. I started paying attention.
What Kirby actually is
Kirby is a flat-file CMS – meaning it stores everything in plain text files and folders rather than a database. Each page on your site is a folder. The content lives in a text file. Images sit right alongside it. No MySQL, no complex server setup, no database to manage separately.
My first instinct – it was relief. No database? No MySQL to configure, back up and worry about? I was in.
For the vast majority of websites – portfolios, company sites, marketing pages – a database is unnecessary overhead. It's another dependency, another thing to secure, another layer that can behave unexpectedly. With Kirby, backing up a site means copying a folder. Deploying to a new server means moving files. It's almost boring in how straightforward it is, and I mean that as a compliment.
Performance-wise, the results speak for themselves. Without database queries on every page load, sites are fast by default. I've built Kirby sites that score 95+ on Google PageSpeed Insights without doing anything out of the ordinary.
A blank canvas
Kirby doesn't impose itself on you. There are no bundled themes, no prescribed markup, no CSS frameworks you didn't ask for. When you start a project, you start with nothing – which is exactly what I want.
I write the HTML. I control every layout decision, every line of CSS. It sounds obvious, but it's actually quite rare. Most CMS platforms make assumptions about how your site should be built, and you spend a surprising amount of time either working with those assumptions or around them. With Kirby, the site I build is the site I intended to build. Nothing more, nothing unexpected.
The panel clients actually use
I've fixed and maintained enough WordPress sites to have strong feelings about the admin interface. It's cluttered, it hasn't meaningfully improved in years, and clients consistently struggle with it. The block editor in particular has caused me more content formatting headaches than I care to count – not because clients do anything wrong, but because it makes decisions for them that are hard to unpick.
Kirby's Panel – its admin interface – is customisable per project. When I build a site, I design the Panel to match the content it needs to manage. If a page needs a title, an intro paragraph and an image gallery, that's exactly what appears. Nothing more.
This sounds like a small thing. In practice it changes the handover entirely. Clients open the Panel and immediately understand it, because it reflects their content rather than a generic content model. Most of the time I don't need to write instructions at all.
The licence question
Kirby isn't free. It costs £89 + VAT per site, and that surprises some people. But free software has hidden costs that aren't always obvious upfront. WordPress is free to download, but factor in premium plugins, security services and the hosting requirements to run it properly and the cost climbs quickly. More to the point, you're relying on a large ecosystem of third-party developers to keep maintaining their plugins. When they stop – and they do – you can find yourself with a broken component and no straightforward fix.
Kirby's licence funds a small team that has been building and maintaining the same focused product since 2012. That continuity matters to me. After Perch, I know what it costs when a platform quietly disappears.
Why it suits working alone
I work independently, which means when something breaks at an inconvenient time, there's no one to hand it to. That concentrates the mind when choosing tools.
My experience with WordPress – mainly through maintaining and fixing other people's sites – is that it generates a particular kind of ongoing friction. Plugins conflict with each other. Automated updates cause problems. Something that worked last month quietly stops working. None of it is catastrophic, but it all takes time, and time is the one thing you can't recover.
Kirby sites don't have these problems to the same degree. The maintenance overhead is low, the failure modes are straightforward, and when something does go wrong it's usually obvious why. That reliability is worth a lot when you're working on your own.
When I'd recommend something else
Not every project is right for Kirby, and I think it's worth being clear about that. Large-scale e-commerce with complex inventory management is better handled by a dedicated platform like Shopify. Projects involving large teams editing content simultaneously, with version control and approval workflows, are better served by a database-backed system.
The work I typically take on – custom websites for small businesses, creative professionals and independent organisations – fits Kirby well. But if a project has requirements that push against what Kirby does, I'd rather say so early than discover it halfway through.
Why I use it
I didn't look for an alternative to WordPress because I wanted something different for its own sake. I needed a CMS I could trust after Perch, one that suited the way I work and produced results I could stand behind. Kirby does that.
If you've been looking at alternatives to heavier CMS platforms, it's worth downloading the trial and building something small with it. The documentation is genuinely good, and the learning curve is less steep than it might appear. Whether it suits your way of working is something you'll know fairly quickly.
Interested in a website built with Kirby? Get in touch to discuss your project, or read more about my web design services.