We’re big fans of Statamic at Webslice, so much so that we built webslice.com with it.
To explain why Webslice uses Statamic (and why you should consider it too), we turned to Ben who runs the Product & Automation team here at Webslice. He’s been here since we launched our Containers platform over 10 years ago, and was the driving force behind the Webslice Serverless platform, which his team launched in late 2025.
We sat down with Ben to get the full story of why we use Statamic, and what our team thinks about using it.
The path to Statamic
Having spent years running his own web development studio, it’s unsurprising that Ben has lots of thoughts about the wide world of content management systems (CMS).
Way back in 2008, his studio initially used a CMS called ExpressionEngine. In Ben’s opinion, when ExpressionEngine first emerged (even further back, in 2004) it was one of the most flexible CMS options on the market. It stood out for the way it made building unique templates easy.
“You had a blank canvas where you built whatever fields you wanted, and you built your completely custom theme on top of that. It didn't make assumptions about your content or your views on anything,” said Ben.
Over time, as ExpressionEngine stagnated, its popularity declined. Ben and his studio eventually moved on to Craft CMS. It was created by a prolific ExpressionEngine add-on developer and shared the same blank canvas philosophy, but this time with more modern architecture and even more flexibility. It was a natural evolution.
Aboard the ship
When Ben joined our small team in 2013, he took responsibility for our custom-built and hand-coded websites. The business was growing, so he wasn’t going to be working alone for long. That meant getting ready for a future where multiple designers and content writers all contributed. Time for a CMS.
“Craft was great. It shared the same kind of ideas as ExpressionEngine, but clean, modified and improved.”
But using Craft also meant working with a database, which made it tricky to version control dynamic content. Databases could be moved between staging and production with each deploy, but only manually. Craft suited us well for many years but this version control friction was the reason Ben eventually replaced it.
Flat-files for more control
Flat-file websites store content in plain text files, meaning there’s no database requirement. When someone changes content the server saves the file and Git can easily compare versions. No more database migrations or re-entering content in production. It’s a big reason why Statamic stood out as a Craft replacement.
Interestingly, Statamic’s creator (like Craft’s creator) had made ExpressionEngine add-ons and saw that something more was possible. If Craft was a new, more user-friendly version of ExpressionEngine, Statamic was another evolution that retained all the best ideas and improved version control.
“We went to Statamic to give us that version controlled flat-file structure. We were hoping, and expecting, we could make it more performant and remove the database requirement. At the same time, we also retained the ease-of-use, templating and custom field management we wanted,” said Ben.
“We wanted to be able to say to a marketing team, or anyone who's working on content, ‘Hey, you can go edit the production content in staging, and then we can deploy that directly to production and it's all done’. “
We weighed up other CMS options but nothing quite fit the bill like Statamic did.
“None of them had the ease-of-use templating approach we wanted and the extensibility of being in a common PHP framework. Statamic's built on Laravel, which means we have the full Laravel framework there ready for us to extend and build functionality on, which we have done for our sites.”
Five happy years and counting
We’ve been building our websites with Statamic since 2021.
“There’s never been any inclination from anyone here to get away from Statamic. It’s a pretty big endorsement that everyone that uses it talks about it positively. How many pieces of software do you stop and go: Everyone who uses it really genuinely likes this thing? I can't think of many,” said Ben.
Given Ben’s roots going back to ExpressionEngine, it shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s among our biggest Statamic advocates.
“It's one of the most pleasant, and productive CMSs I have ever used. The care and attention to detail is evident through every part of the platform. Statamic doesn’t look and feel like every other CMS out there,” said Ben.
Details big and small
Since using Statamic, we’ve found ourselves appreciating the small details as much as the big ticket items.
“It all comes down to that user experience, both for editors and developers. The control panel is just as intuitive as the templating and extension system. It’s thoughtful, across the board which is rare for products these days” said Ben.
“It's consistently improved with each release too. People often complain about software updates as enshittification takes hold (note: something we work really hard to keep out of our products) and the software gets worse. Statamic has consistently gotten better, and I think it's very obvious to me that there's a team behind it that cares.”
That care is easy to spot. Take, for example, how easy it is to list 12 blog posts in a template:
{{ collection:blog limit="12" }}
<div class="post">
<h2>{{ title }}</h2>
<p>{{ excerpt }}</p>
</div>
{{ /collection:blog }}Or if you want to convert an existing site to a multi-site to allow regionalized content and pricing:
php please multisiteOne command. And take note that Statamic's command-line alias is “please”, another example of that personality and attitude. You can spot plenty of charm like this across the rest of the ecosystem.
“When you go to the website, you can see that they are passionate about what they do. You read the docs, you can see the attention to detail but also the personality and flair coming through,” said Ben.
And ultimately, “it’s just fun to work with”.
A wider appreciation
It’s not just Ben. Everyone in the team who works with Statamic has a good time using it.
Take it from Ariel, who designed the Webslice site. When Ariel joined the team he was completely new to Statamic, and now he rarely considers touching any other CMS.
“I've been trying other CMSs, but I always come back to Statamic because it’s really easy to make simple websites. Then if you want to scale that to something more complicated, you can do that as well,” Ariel told us.
Ariel learnt Statamic on the job, so he’s well aware of what it takes to pick up, and get to grips building websites with it.
“I feel it's really simple. Once you get it, you really see how simple it is. Especially because you're not dealing with databases or more complex things. Everything you need is in the documentation with really good examples.”
His design process begins with a blank canvas (one of core ideas that drew Ben towards ExpressionEngine and Statamic in the first place).
As a designer, he has the freedom to customise the look and feel of Statamic sites from the ground up, without the CMS making any overbearing assumptions about how things should look and function.
“I can make the visual part first and then think about how it's going to be built for the content management system behind it. I can design a hero section, and then I can add the content. I can build the website with pieces.
“It's a great tool for designers.”
When design meets content, Statamic maintains structure
Ariel’s work doesn’t only affect what you see when you visit webslice.com. He also lays out the interfaces used by those of us who work on website content. For every page, the structure of the visual layout is tightly coupled to the structure of the behind-the-scenes author interface.
For one small example, let’s look at the home page section that introduces the two Webslice hosting platforms: Containers and Serverless.
In the back end, this simple section is split into fields for every heading, icon, paragraph and button. It’s a structure that guides the content team through the design. There’s no getting lost in a giant text field, no departing from the right subheading hierarchy, and no over-the-top font controls in the wrong hands. Almost everything that you see on the Webslice site is divided into meaningful pieces like these, and managed in easily-understood interfaces.
Easier for everyone
With most CMSs, content editors can easily make changes that dilute the website’s original, curated design. For us though, Statamic’s clean structure holds everything together, letting us evolve the design and content however we like.
As Ben puts it: “You can be working on content, and at the same time we can be working on design, templating complete revamps of the site on the side, and pushing those changes through. Our designer and front-end people love working on it, and, hopefully, our content team enjoys working with it as well.”
He’s right about that. Before Statamic, I’d used WordPress and Drupal a lot, and briefly used some smaller platforms that I can’t remember much about. None of them were as intuitive or painless as Statamic.
It all comes down to that user experience. The control panel for Statamic is intuitive, easy to use, and pleasant to look at. It’s thoughtful, which is rare for products on the internet these days.
Statamic’s control panel and the content publication pipeline didn’t really have a learning curve to speak of. It felt familiar, as if I‘d already used it before. It felt like they had cherry-picked the parts of other CMS control panels that people actually used and threw out all the rest.
From the POV of a content editor, and of one of the more recent arrivals to the Webslice team, I can vouch that Statamic is a CMS that your marketing team will be happy using. No complaints from me.
Similar paths, similar experience
Our path to Statamic was a long one, winding through years of experience with other systems. As Ben followed CMS developments (and developers) from ExpressionEngine through Craft to Statamic, the biggest pain points in our collective website work were sequentially solved.
Now that we’ve got a few years of Statamic under our belts, we’re confident that we made the right call. Across the Webslice team, our developers, designers, and content producers are all happy to be using Statamic. (We can’t say that about all the software in our stack). It’s a long-term decision that’s made maintaining and developing webslice.com painless for the whole team.
The way we run our Statamic site on Webslice Serverless is another thing that’s paying off long term, but that’s a story for another day.
Questions or feedback
Got Statamic up and running on Webslice Containers or Serverless? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
We’re running this very website on Statamic, and hosting it on Webslice Serverless. If you want to give Statamic on Webslice Serverless a go, spin up your first project today and we'll add $5 to your account.
If you have questions or run into anything unexpected, get in touch with our support team.