My wife is buying a small business. They have a website that I'm going to have to take over, and I have a feeling I'm going to want to redo it (it's not terrible looking, but I'm pretty sure it's WP, so just no thank you).

Was just wondering if anybody had any reccomendations for a cheap/free headless CMS?

Saw Ghost for $25/month but it has "user" limitations (as in, seemingly, limits to your site traffic). I'm just basically looking for cheap image/blog hosting queryable from a REST/GQL API. I'm considering just making a simple frontend for my wife to write markdown blogs up to S3 or something if there's no cheaper option.

Before you run off and change it ask yourself these questions.

From a business perspective, what's the value add of changing the website?

Are you expanding or adding functionality?

What's the cost going to be of the change?

Will it be cheaper to host?

What is your plan to migrate existing customers to the new platform?

How are you going to train your customers to use the new interface?

You also should have an idea of what customers you will be targeting and including in your development efforts so that you don't run off the rails and create something none of your customers can use.

I would recommend the top customers with a monthly spend of 35% of your yearly profits or the top 10(whatever is more monthly income).

Take my advice, unless it's broken, don't fix it.

"Because it's WordPress" is never a valid enough of a reason to drain finite resources and strain customer relationships. Maybe your insight would be better suited for process improvement and automation?

@sariel I despise maintaining old tech. It's what I do all day at my job. So for me... it's somewhat of a passion project.

But it's not like customers really "use" this. The business is a bakery and the website is mostly marketing, a blog, and an email blaster (which I'm not sure if anyone has signed up or if the current owner sends out marketing blasts).

Trust me, I get where you're coming from. I reccomend Squarespace and Wix to people all the time as the most appropriate solution, and I get that it could meet this use case. However, I'm going to have to own this possibly for the rest of my life, so I would like to build something that I'm happy with, and hey if I want to switch jobs I'll have a great fullstack example to show off in the process.

But don't worry, I know what I'm doing. I will be working on this in free time and likely won't replace the site for at least 6 months to a year or so.

In the mean time, can we just talk about how absurdly terrible @aws-sdk/s3-client is? Good lord, I can't believe how hard they have to make it to pull the actual data for an object! It's absolute lunacy.

Look at how easy it used to be to pull the data for an object, and look how hard it is in the 2021 update!
https://stackoverflow.com/a/...

I think any type of website is too much for a bakery. Make sure it's on Google maps with pictures and good reviews.

@blindXfish if it were a new business I would generally agree. Show up on Google and post on social media platforms.

However, I think a lot of people prefer to contact businesses with an email address, in which case you sort of need a website to distribute imo. You can post an email on social media, but if someone is looking for an email, they're looking for it on a website.

The main thing though, is that my wife is doing a silent takeover with the owner transitioning out over 3 months so I want to maintain the current infrastructure and I want to meet the prior clientele's expectations, seeing as the previous owner has done really well for herself overall.

Gatsby or Jekyll or Hugo?

@dan-pud those seem to all be full site generators. I was likely going to go with Next for fully static pages. But I wanted to fetch content from a CMS. But because all the data is public I think I'm just going to go the S3 route (or more specifically, Digital Ocean Spaces so that I don't have to give Jeff more money).

@lurch sounds like you have a good plan then.

Make it easy on yourself and just make a statically hosted site or asset in S3.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS...

No lambda, no keys, and all the benefits of CloudFront CDN caching.

@lurch they generate the site which you can then put into S3. Pretty straightforward to setup and maintain

Gatsby on Netlify. You can even access the api from your current wp site and pull content into your new site.

I think strapi with next.js will be a good fit