Why MODX – aka the Alternative to WordPress

MODX is the platform for growing organizations that want to crush SEO, speed, and conversion … and for those that seek the creative freedom to power their vision with pixel-perfect precision.

By Ryan Thrash  |  Updated: September 26, 2023  |  3 min read
Why MODX – aka the Alternative to WordPress

Why is MODX right for you or your clients?

When it comes to scaling, growing a business, or crushing SEO and conversion—especially when doing paid digital acquisition—you want the best foundation for your investment.

From day one, we chose security, speed, and creative freedom as the founding principles for MODX … and on those subjects, we crush it compared to the competition.

  • Security – Security is baked into MODX’s DNA and our track record speaks for itself: https://modx.com/security. (TL;DR: the competition has 20-100x+ more security issues.)

    Simon Langham headshot

    We can always rely on MODX for top-notch security, and the flexibility to meet the needs of every website we develop.

    Simon Langham // Unumbox
  • Speed – When it comes to website speed, having a fast website is a key factor in online success today more than ever. Site visitors with busy lives don’t want to wait a few seconds to find what they're looking for. When Google added Core Web Vitals as ranking factors, speed also became a crucial factor in how your site ranks.

    You need a CMS that is purposefully architected from its inception to deliver web pages as fast as possible: MODX.

    Katharina Utsch headshot

    I can build complete and beautiful websites with all the functionality I want without being handicapped like I was with WordPress. MODX websites are lightweight, fast-loading, and SEO optimized by default.

    Katharina Utsch // Reikotec
  • Creative Freedom – With our first release way back in 2005, you could have powered a site using HTML5, CSS3, Tailwind, and React, even though those things didn’t exist way back then. Think about that for a second … pretty cool, if not downright revolutionary, eh?

    Today, if you can prototype a website using virtually any front-end framework, MODX can power it with pixel-perfect precision, scale to handle more traffic than most sites will ever see, and serve pages faster than just about anything else.

    And because it has a really great API, developers can integrate with practically anything out there.

    Michael Snow headshot

    MODX is the best platform I’ve found for custom websites. It saves us development time especially compared to WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. I keep trying other CMSes but none fit my needs like MODX.

    Michael Snow // Snow Creative

If you’re a growing business that’s investing in marketing—or you just want the best there is—there is no better platform for optimizing and accelerating your online success.

When WordPress Makes Sense

WordPress is an exceptional tool to get easy wins fast, especially on limited budgets. It's a great way to shortcut to an MVP, figure out if you have product/market fit, creating prototypes, proving early traction, or even just figuring out the basics of how you want your site to work.

But…

If you’re going to truly scale your business, and want to adapt your site to exactly meet your needs without technical/usability/design compromises, then you should choose MODX. In fact, faced with a similar choice, Alpha Toro, formerly Rocket City Digital, went all in with MODX—literally porting dozens of sites. As you’ll hear in the video below, it transformed their business and makes them look like SEO superheros to their customers.

You can absolutely bend WordPress to meet similar needs with enough custom plugins, but in the end you'll wind up with a bloated, slow, complex, and fragile custom implementation with the bonus of a huge security target that comes for free along with it. And due to the overhead of plugin-driven builds, you’re going to fight the performace that's so critical to SEO and how Google ranks sites today.

Experiment and play around with WordPress—scale with MODX.