Which CMS is best for your housebuilder website?

As a housebuilder, your website is a key sales and marketing tool. Having the right digital platform for growth is vital – and that starts with selecting the right content management system (CMS). Having a CMS suited to your needs ensures you’re able to showcase properties and developments, integrate with internal tools to improve efficiencies and scale effortlessly as you grow.

Some key considerations for housebuilders when it comes to selecting a CMS platform include:

• Content management needs – what sort of content or media are you working with? E.g. developments and house types, site plans, hi-res imagery, video tours. Are you a large housebuilder with multiple brands that you need to manage from the same place?
• Editing experience – who needs to be able to manage the content on your website? Do they have experience with a particular CMS platform?
• Flexibility and customisation – do you require some highly customisable features like search functionality, interactive site plans, lead gen tools (e.g. mortgage calculators, etc?)
• Scalability – how much data do you manage currently? What is the mid to long-term looking like in terms of the growth and expansion of your housebuilder? Do you expect growth in developments resulting in uplifts in traffic or the data you’re going to be processing internally and externally?
• Cost – what does your budget look like for the project – initial investment and any recurring costs?

A headless website or headless CMS is a way of setting up a website that separates or decouples the front-end from the backend content management. Rather than being bundled into a single application and everything being delivered as one every time a page is requested, your front-end website is a static layer, and content is fed to it from your CMS and cached as data via an API layer. This can help with enhanced performance, scalability and flexibility but does mean slightly more development time and budget needed upfront.

Sanity is natively headless, whereas WordPress isn’t but can be built as a headless project.

WordPress

• Open source
• Free to use
• Most popular CMS in the world, powering 43% of live websites
• Large support community
• A “traditional” CMS that can be deployed as headless

Sanity

• Natively headless – no frontend platform
• Subscription-based including hosting
• Not as widely used – powers about 36,000 sites worldwide (covering some major global brands)
• Structured content – Sanity interprets content as data so you can define more custom content types and relationships rather than adhering to a set structure

We’ll kick off by saying that when it comes to comparing WordPress and Sanity, it’s not about which one is better – we’ve launched successful projects on both platforms. There are things that each platform does slightly better than the other depending on your requirements. We’ll work closely with you to understand those requirements and advise you which will be the ideal approach.

WordPress

• Widely used platform so marketing teams more likely to be familiar with the editing experience
• Can be configured with reusable blocks which can be utilised in an intuitive drag-and-drop style with the Gutenberg editor
• Supports multi-site management

Sanity

• Despite being less widely used and therefore potentially less familiar to marketing teams, the editing experience is just as intuitive
• Can define more custom content, page and post types and the relationships between them due to the way Sanity interprets content as data
• Offers real-time collaborative editing
• Supports multi-site management

WordPress

• Best suited to more simple content needs but can handle more complexity through customisation due to it being open-source
• Can be a traditional or headless CMS
• Large ecosystem of plugins and add-ons to add more functionality

Sanity

• Better suited to deep customisation and complex projects with highly specific needs
• Being natively headless offers complete flexibility from the off in terms of frontend framework
• Growing ecosystem of plugins and add-ons
• CMS can be tailored to show complex reporting in a simple view*
• Advanced user permission helps you to manage access to different types of data in the CMS at a granular level**

* This could be useful if for example you wanted to be able to include a top-level dashboard view of enquiries/viewings booked across developments and properties.

** Useful if you’re running sites across multiple regions and only want the editor to be able to add, edit and view content assigned specifically to that site and/or region.

WordPress

• Can be highly scalable if setup and optimised in the right way
• Slightly more limited for more complex data models and large-scale sites

Sanity

• Highly scalable due to headless architecture and cloud-based infrastructure
• Better suited to more complex and large-scale projects
• Easy to extend to pull data from third-party sources or to run import and export from multiple sources automatically

WordPress

• Lower initial development costs
• No platform fees
• Ongoing maintenance recommended at a minimum to ensure WordPress core and plugins are updated to ensure your website is secure

Sanity

• Initial development costs are slightly higher as it’s a completely custom environment
• Ongoing subscription required (but this covers half your hosting)
• Some cost savings in terms of hosting- you just need to source hosting for the frontend (note – we can handle this!)

Choose WordPress (in a headless setup) if you’re looking for a familiar solution which is easier to pick up and run with. Ideal for SME housebuilders with growth in mind further down the line.

Choose Sanity if you need higher performance, better scalability, security and a more customisable setup with more options for content types and integrations. Ideal for housebuilders with multiple medium to large developments covering a large range of house types who are looking for a solution to prepare them for future growth.

Need expert advice? We’ll carefully consider all of your requirements and needs and recommend the best solution for you.