20 Lightweight CMS For Simple Website Projects

For this roundup we have compiled a list of 20 lightweight cms that idel for your simple/small website project. Some of them also feature a visual editor with WYSIWYG features as well as user and role management. Try them out, and decide for yourself which one best fits your needs and the needs of your clients. If you know other products or have some opinion about this CMS please add a comment, thanks!

See also:

• 15 Best Open Source Ecommerce CMS
• 12 Open Source Microblogging Software
• The Ultimate Guide to CMS [Infographic]

CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple, an open source content management system, allows for faster and easier management of website content. This CMS is scalable for small businesses to large corporations.

Frog CMS

Frog CMS simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management.

Sitecake

Sitecake is an simple and small CMS (Content Managament System) for websites, with a WYSIWYG, drag & drop editor. A standard web hosting packet (a web server and PHP 5.4+) is all you need to install and use it.

Pagekit

Pagekit is a modular and lightweight CMS built with modern technologies like Symfony components and Doctrine. It provides an awesome platform for theme and extension developers.

gpEasy

gpEasy is a fast and easy CMS with flat-file Storage. It is a open source CMS written in PHP focused on ease of use with true WYSIWYG editing and flat-file storage. gpEasy no need for MySQL. SQLite isn't used either. Page content and site configuration are all stored in flat files instead of a database making gpEasy portable, easy to install, and fast.

Pico

Pico is an a stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file CMS. With this CMS, you can creating and maintaining a website as simple as editing text files. It uses flat-files as the database and built with PHP. Simply, there is no setup and the app works instantly.

Grav

Grav is a Fast, Simple, and Flexible file-based Web-platform. There is Zero installation required. Just extract the ZIP archive, and you are already up and running. It follows similar principles to other flat-file CMS platforms, but has a different design philosophy than most.

Anchor

Anchor is a super-simple, lightweight blog system, made to let you just write. Prefer your blog systems without the bloat? Anchor weighs in smaller than a standard JPG image (~150kb).

Kirby

Kirby lets you write content in Markdown format by default, but there are visual markdown editor plugins to make writing fun. Kirby's highly flexible API is very easy to learn and will boost your productivity while you can focus on building high-quality websites for your clients.

PyroCMS

PyroCMS is used by individuals, small & medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create & build a variety of websites & web-enabled applications.

Wolf CMS

It simplifies content management by offering an elegant user interface, flexible templating per page, simple user management and permissions, as well as the tools necessary for file management.

Monstra

Monstra is a modern and lightweight Content Management System.Easy to install, upgrade and use. Monstra installation only takes a few minutes. Without any databases to configure! Monstra uses best frontend and backend optimization practice. Monstra minify html, css, js files to Reduce Payload Size. Also combine css and js files to Reduce HTTP Round-Trips

WonderCMS

WonderCMS is the smallest CMS in the world (their claim). Its size is quite small (just 15kb on 7 files) yet it shas cool feature such as editing content in place. You can grab themes, and get plugins to add features to your site such as adding a gallery and a WYSIWYG editor.

Bolt

Bolt is a tool for Content Management, which strives to be as simple and straightforward as possible. It is quick to set up, easy to configure, uses elegant templates, and above all: It's a joy to use. Bolt is created using modern Open Source libraries, and is best suited to build sites in HTML5, with modern markup.

Nibbleblog

Nibbleblog is a powerful engine for creating blogs, all you need is PHP to work. Very simple to install and configure (only 1 step).

Automad

Automad is a file-based flat CMS and template engine. It is designed to be fully portable without any dependencies on databases or fixed locations and doesn't require any complicated setup process. All data gets stored in a human readable form. A two step caching system makes your site extremely fast.

Fork

Fork CMS is dedicated to creating a user friendly environment to build, monitor and update your website. We take great pride in being the Content Management System of choice for beginners and professionals.

GetSimple CMS

GetSimple is an XML based, stand-a-alone, fully independant and lite Content Management System.

Dropplets

Dropplets is a minimalist Markdown blogging platform focused on delivering just what you need in a blogging solution. When it comes to basic blogging, all you really want to do is write & publish which is where Dropplets excels. Dropplets is a fresh platform dedicated to making blogging simple.

TinyCMS

TinyCMS is a CMS (Content Management Software) written in php, that tries to be as user friendly as possible, very smart and most importantly, extremely fast.