Why I pay to be a Statamic partner

13 July 2026 in Web Development

My site says I’m a Statamic partner. Worth explaining what that is, because it’s probably not what you’d guess. Being a partner doesn’t mean Statamic pays me to bring them clients. It’s the other way around: I pay them for it.

I do that because I’m convinced Statamic is the best CMS for most of the sites I build. There’s no commission coming my way, which makes my advice easy: I’ve got no reason to point you at Statamic other than thinking it’s genuinely the right fit.

What Statamic is

Statamic is a CMS: the system you use to manage your website’s content, like WordPress, only more modern and a lot nicer to work with. It stores content in files instead of a database, which makes it faster and far less prone to the hacking attempts WordPress sites deal with constantly. (I go into the full comparison in WordPress vs Statamic.)

Clients like it too. A couple have told me, unprompted, that it just works: clean and uncluttered, with no digging through plugin settings to change something. Less of a battle than they’re used to.

Why I went all in

Almost everyone who thinks about a website thinks WordPress. Clients call me and just assume that’s what they’re getting. I get it, WordPress runs about a third of the internet, but for plenty of those sites it isn’t the smartest choice. I built WordPress sites for years, and I’ve come round to Statamic being the better call for most of my clients.

So I decided to properly back it. Paying to be a partner is part of that, but I also try to actually help. I built and released my first starter kit, Gustamic, a restaurant website template aimed squarely at non-technical people: set it up once and a client can run their own site and edit content without a developer looking over their shoulder.

Being a partner also puts me in the Statamic Discord, in direct contact with the team. So when I hit a bug I report it straight to them, and I flag documentation that could be clearer. It’s also where you keep up with what other Statamic developers are building, and there are meetups in person too. I recently went to one here in the Netherlands with Laurens Kuiper (a developer friend, and the reason I got into Statamic in the first place), where you see bigger companies running it as their main CMS, even in front of hefty Magento webshops.

There’s one reason behind all of it: I’d like Statamic to grow. It’s still mostly a developer’s world, and that’s the part I want to help change, taking the technical side off my clients’ hands so they get a site that’s easy to run without being technical themselves. That’s what people are really after when they ask for “a WordPress site.” I’ve got more brewing on that front: more starter kits, some AI automation in the content editing, ways to spin up a Statamic site without a developer at all. More on that once there’s something to show.

What I’m built for

If there’s one job that makes me happy, it’s taking an old WordPress site that’s slow, buckling under its own plugins and barely maintainable, and rebuilding it into a fast, modern Statamic site. I know both worlds well enough to know where WordPress gets stuck and how to make the same thing run smoothly in Statamic. If you’re looking for a specialist, you can also find me on the Statamic partners page.

So if your WordPress site is giving you more headaches than joy, or you’re starting something new and wondering whether WordPress is really the right pick, send me a message. And if I tell you Statamic is the way to go, you already know it’s not the commission talking.