Insights | Development

Shake your Wagtail

31 October 2019

Wordpress has always been one of the most popular open source CMS’s in the industry but there is a new ‘bird’ in town, get ready to shake your Wagtail

Wagtail is a relatively new CMS but we have been using it for some time here at Dodgems and Floss. And wow, what a CMS, we love it! The likes of Google, Mozilla, The NHS and NASA are all powering their digital estates with Wagtail. So it’s not just us that thinks this is the future CMS for the web.

Why we love Wagtail

Wagtail is built with the fastest-growing programming language, Python, which makes it super flexible to extend the website with application integrations, including AI functionality. It’s a lightweight framework so no bloated code that’s just not needed, making websites super fast and super simple to set up and start building on.

Its dashboard is totally customisable, so every CMS can look different and will be built uniquely to the specific requirements. Pages can be built quickly and easily with the pre-built components and then you can add to these with custom content modules using Streamfields designed for any type of content.

No plugins are needed with Wagtail because it’s all built straight into the CMS. Top notch security out of the box means monthly security updates are a thing of the past with Wagtail. A form builder that takes it to the next level; and you can create more than just a form, how about polls and surveys. There’s a brilliant A/B testing function, so you can test those pages with different content, layouts and CTA’s, to get the best conversion.

One of our favourite features is that image cropping and compression can be done on the fly straight in the page template without having to regenerate those images in the backend. This is super handy for different image sizes for desktop, tablet and mobile making pages super quick for all devices.

Wagtail goes above and beyond with its CMS features, and its flexibility and customisation is second to none. Every website has different requirements, which means they require different technologies to build them. WordPress still has its place but going forward we highly recommending Wagtail for content-heavy websites that need a more technological and future-ready solution.

Published by

Andrea Downey

Digital Director