Why choose Perch to retrofit your static site?

Adding a CMS to a static site was one of the core use cases we had when initially developing Perch. As the product has moved on that core use case is still a big reason why people use Perch for the first time. In this post I take a look at why Perch is a great choice if you need to retrofit a site.

Perch is page-based

A static site is a set of HTML pages. Perch by default assumes that your site is a set of pages and so maps neatly and directly into your existing architecture. You can keep all your URLs the same and don’t need to rebuild the site.

Our video tutorial demonstrates the process of retrofitting a static site.

Perch doesn’t force you to change your markup

Our template system leaves the markup completely in your hands. Even if you are retrofitting a site that is quite old you won’t have any problems. Just copy out chunks of markup into Perch templates and you can make that page editable quickly and with no obvious change to the front-end of the site.

Perch also works well with frameworks such as Bootstrap. This solution includes templates you can just drop into your site.

Perch has no “themes”

No need to turn your design into a theme or make the entire site content managed. Just drop Perch Regions into the places where you want an editor to be able to make updates.

Not a flimsy, lightweight solution

Perch is a robust and fully featured CMS, that has been designed for small to medium websites. By retrofitting Perch into your site you move it onto a platform that brings many possibilities. If in the future you want to add more content managed functionality, or provide a blog, events section or store you can do so within the platform your content editors have become familiar with.

A great way to learn Perch

Retrofitting a site is a great way to start to learn how to develop with Perch. We find that having built one site Perchers quickly move on to creating far more advanced content managed features. Time invested switching that first site paying off many times over.

Building your business on Perch

We have many customers building successful businesses on top of offering Perch websites to their clients. We hear time and time again how easy clients find Perch to use. How moving to Perch means that “how do I do x?” support calls almost disappear. That means that when offering low-cost solutions to small businesses you don’t need to account for so much time spent handholding after delivering the project, and can move on to the next product swiftly.