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Why we recommend Sanity over WordPress

Tech level Casual

Light tech vocabulary. Nothing scary.

A comparison of Sanity CMS and WordPress, and why we pivoted to Sanity as our go-to after 10+ years of WordPress builds.

WordPress runs a huge share of the web, and for good reason. It is familiar, flexible, and there is a plugin for almost anything. We have built plenty of WordPress sites, and we still recommend it for the right project.

But for most new builds, we recommend a headless setup instead: a fast front end paired with Sanity as the content dashboard. Here is the case for why.

The real question is not features. It is friction.

Almost any platform can produce the website you want on launch day. What separates them is month six - when a staff member needs to update a bio, fix a typo, or add an event. If that edit is quick, the site stays accurate. If it means logging into a cluttered admin, hunting through plugin menus, and hoping nothing breaks, the edit quietly never happens. That is the real cost of a hard-to-edit site.

Where Sanity pulls ahead

Sanity is only the content editor. Your team gets clean, purpose-built fields, not a CMS buried under forty plugin menus. Content is structured, so one update flows everywhere it should appear. And performance is built in, because the front end is real code rather than a stack of plugins competing with each other.

When WordPress is still the right call

We are not religious about this. WordPress wins when your team has deep WordPress experience and you value zero retraining, or when you need a plugin that only exists in the WordPress ecosystem - a specialized membership or learning platform, for example. If you are in one of those situations, we will say so.

The bottom line

For a site that needs to stay fast, stay current, and be genuinely easy for your team to run, a headless build on Sanity is the setup we would choose for our own work. In fact, it is the one we did choose - the site you are reading runs on it.

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About the author

Bobby McGivney

I run Planted Sky, a solo web studio out of Fort Myers, Florida. I have been building websites for over a decade - WordPress, Astro, Sanity, custom builds, the whole spread. I write here when I have something worth saying about the actual craft of running a small business online, without the LinkedIn voice.