Why I switched back to a simple CMS

I recently moved away from Strapi and back to a much simpler, frontmatter-based CMS for my personal site.

That is not a criticism of Strapi. In fact, one of the main reasons I adopted it in the first place was because I wanted to learn it properly. It gave me a good look at how a modern CMS handles structured content, relationships, admin interfaces, and publishing workflows. For that purpose, it was absolutely worth using.

But once the learning phase was over, I had to ask a more practical question: what do I actually need for my own website?

The honest answer was: not very much.

I mostly want to publish articles, keep a few fields like title, date, tags, and summary, and make changes without thinking too hard about the tooling. For that kind of workflow, a larger CMS started to feel like more system than site.

A frontmatter-based setup fits my needs much better. My content lives in plain markdown files, the metadata sits at the top of each file, and everything stays easy to read, edit, and version.

Frontmatter is the small block of metadata at the top of a markdown file. It can hold things like the title, date, tags, and summary, while the article itself lives below it.

1---
2title: My article title
3date: 2026-03-22
4tags:
5  - cms
6  - writing
7summary: A short description of the article.
8draft: false
9---
10
11# My article title
12
13This is where the actual content starts.

What I like most about this approach is the clarity. There is no mystery about where my content is stored, how it is rendered, or what I need to back up. A folder contains an article. The markdown file contains the writing. The frontmatter contains the metadata. That is the whole system.

It also makes writing feel lighter. When the publishing workflow is simple, I am more likely to keep using it. I spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time improving the actual content, which is the part I care about most.

So while Strapi was valuable as a learning experience, it turned out not to be the right long-term fit for this site. For my personal writing, simpler is better: fewer moving parts, less overhead, and a workflow I can understand at a glance.

And honestly, that is probably the kind of CMS I wanted all along.