Boxlet or WordPress?
For a site of a few pages, a fair comparison, including what Boxlet doesn't do.
WordPress runs a large part of the web and can be made into almost anything. That's its strength, and for a small site it's also the work: a theme, plugins for SEO, forms, images and security, updates for each of them, and a cookie banner when one of them sets cookies.
Boxlet starts from the other end. It does the handful of things a small site needs, built in, and leaves the rest out.
Side by side
Plugins
WordPress: one for each need, from many authors. Boxlet: none, and none needed. Design, forms, pictures, languages, statistics, redirects and SEO are built in.
Cookies
WordPress: depends on the theme and plugins, and often means a banner. Boxlet: no cookies for visitors, so usually no banner.
Speed
WordPress: depends on the theme and plugins. Boxlet: next to no JavaScript and a page cache; its demo scores 100 on PageSpeed on a computer and 99 on a phone.
Design
WordPress: a theme, then a page builder for more. Boxlet: 21 design sets, then colours and typefaces of your own, and text that's hard to read is refused.
Languages
WordPress: a translation plugin. Boxlet: built in, with an address and menus for each language and hreflang written for you, and AI translation with your own key.
Updates
WordPress: the core, the theme and each plugin, on their own schedules. Boxlet: one update from the admin, with a backup first and a way back.
Your WordPress rankings come with you
Moving doesn't mean starting again in search. Boxlet has redirects built in: in Redirects, add each old WordPress address and the page it lives at now. Visitors and search engines are sent on with a permanent 301, which tells Google the page has moved, so its place in the results moves to the new address.
Addresses such as /2019/05/about-us/ or /?p=12 work as typed; capital letters, a last slash and the order of a query don't matter. Each rule counts how often it's used, so you can see old links still arriving. For a site of a dozen pages, that's about ten minutes.
When WordPress is the better choice
- You need a shop, a membership area, or a blog with comments.
- Several people log in, with different roles.
- The site depends on a particular plugin or theme.
- You want the largest choice of hosts and freelancers who already know the system.
When Boxlet is the better choice
- A site of a few pages for a business, a practice, a venue or a person.
- You build such sites for others and want each to look designed without writing CSS.
- You'd rather not have a cookie banner, or plugins to keep up to date.
- Ordinary shared hosting, with no SSH.
Questions
Can I move a WordPress site to Boxlet?
Yes, without losing its place in search. There's no importer: you write the pages in Boxlet's editor, which for a small site is an afternoon, then send each old WordPress address to its new page with a permanent redirect.
What about security?
Boxlet has little to attack: no plugins, one administrator, optional two-step login, uploads checked by their contents and kept outside the web root, and updates from the admin with a backup first.
Does Boxlet cost anything?
No. Like WordPress, it's free and open source; Boxlet is MIT licensed.