When should I use Perch Runway?

One of the great strengths of building a project on Perch is that as the site develops over time you have a natural upgrade path to Perch Runway. The presence of two different-yet-the-same products can sometimes raise the question of which you should be using and when. If building a new project, should you choose Perch or Perch Runway? Let’s take a look.

The special case for Perch

Perch is a very special product, and is almost completely unique as a CMS in one key area: Perch can be very easily retrofitted to an existing website. That means you can take an existing static website, marketing landing page, manually updated news page or what have you and just drop Perch in without needing to rebuild.

With this approach you don’t need to turn your site into a CMS theme or rebuild your pages to be delivered through a CMS. You just add the CMS into your existing pages.

This ease of integration is unheard of in the CMS world, and Perch has lead the way in making it as simple as possible to make a static page editable. In fact, many customers work this way even with new projects; they build what is effectively a static site and then add Perch in when they’re ready.

So if you have an existing site, or like the sound of that approach, Perch is the obvious choice.

Staying simple for new builds

If you build websites for small business clients, interest groups, side projects or community projects, you’ll know that not every website is a massive project. Many professionally built websites are just a handful of pages. That doesn’t mean that they don’t need a flexible and fast CMS to power them and keep them up to date.

This is where Perch excels. Designed for professional designers and developers to build with, and for non-expert clients to use, Perch was literally made for these small sites. For clients, it offers a simple page-based interface into updating their site with minimal fuss. For designers, it offers complete creative flexibility without battling with built-in markup or themes. When it comes to development, Perch offers a fast, efficient and stable platform that enables you to deliver projects more quickly and reliably.

Room to grow

Not every site that starts small stays small. A number of free first-party add-ons enable you to grow your Perch site without the need to switch platforms. Whether it’s adding a blog, creating contact forms, or selling a few physical or digital products, Perch has a route to make that simple.

If your site grows to something quite different than initially anticipated, you have a natural path to upgrade to Perch Runway.

There are four distinct cases where you might decide to pick Runway over Perch, and you can read more about them over on the Runway Blog.