---
title: "The death of the CMS"
date: "2026-11-01"
description: "After 20 years of WordPress, Squarespace, Wix and Shopify, I moved my sites to static site generators and handed AI the publishing work that slowed me down."
image: "https://bryanmanio.com/_astro/death-of-the-cms-cover.Db2-L5BR.webp"
url: "https://bryanmanio.com/blog/the-death-of-the-cms/"
---

# The death of the CMS

I've been using a CMS for 20 years at this point, everything from WordPress to Squarespace to Wix to Shopify. I'm used to all of them. But the last six months have been the first time I've migrated all my usual sites off these platforms and onto static site generators, using AI to send posts to the site. It's been a game changer in speed and delivery.

I remember putting off blog articles for [Minimal Goods](https://minimalgoods.co) for so long because of everything involved. I'd have to take the photos, edit the photos, export them at ideal web resolutions, write the article, edit the article, optimize for SEO with various plugins, create Open Graph images, finesse the meta description, and add ratings for the ratings schema. It was a lot of work, and it slowed down my output considerably.

I just posted an article on Minimal Goods, and it's not like that at all anymore.

Now I use [voice transcription](https://bryanmanio.com/blog/all-aboard-the-voice-to-text-train/) to talk through a product review, with a general idea of the structure as I go. Then I do a pass with AI to fix grammar and spelling mistakes, but I never change the structure, voice, or tone of what I'm saying. That's not what I'm trying to do with my writing.

The important part is what happens next. I give it a blob of text straight from Obsidian and a folder of images exported right from the final product photos. It automatically resizes them, converts them to WebP, adds meta descriptions, and puts everything into an article. It handles everything from there.

After 20 years of fighting with plugins, export settings, and admin panels, publishing finally gets out of the way. It's the most jarring shift I've experienced in web publishing, and I don't see myself going back. The CMS is dead, and I'm not mourning it.