Ten years of Wagtail: why we never switched CMS

The short answer: we never switched CMS because in ten years Wagtail never let us down: no forced rebuild, no plugin vulnerability, no technical dead end. Wagtail is the open source CMS behind blog.google, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory website and nhs.uk. We picked it in 2015, back when almost nobody was talking about it, and we never left. Here is what ten years in production taught us, and how to tell whether that choice makes sense for your organisation.

2015: a bet, not an obvious call

Back then WordPress ruled unchallenged. Agencies were selling the same recycled themes and the same stacked plugins. On our side, we were already building business platforms in Python and Django: we needed a CMS that spoke the same language.

Wagtail had just been released by Torchbox, a British agency, under the BSD licence, one of the most permissive in open source. The bet fitted in one sentence: a CMS inheriting Django's robustness and security cycle, with an editing experience designed for real editorial teams.

Ten years later, the first sites we shipped are still running. No painful migration, no massive rewrite, no breaking point along the way: versions follow one another as upgrades, never as switchovers. That is rare, and it is what makes the choice structural.

What was niche became a quiet standard

Google runs several of its publications on Wagtail, including blog.google, and sponsored the project with 150,000 dollars to accelerate its roadmap. The reason put forward by the project is blunt: Wagtail is the only CMS that meets Google's internal security requirements.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory modernised its website on Wagtail. The UK's NHS serves around 45 million visits a month on nhs.uk, and absorbed close to a billion views in twelve months at the peak of the pandemic. Alongside them: Mozilla, MIT, Salesforce, NBC, BMW, the Red Cross, and the US and UK governments. In France, the DINUM chose Wagtail for Sites Faciles, its platform for public sector websites built on the DSFR design system.

None of these organisations picks its technical foundation lightly.

Six reasons that come up in every project

Sovereignty. BSD licence, code entirely under your control. No features locked behind a premium edition, no pricing grid that changes overnight, no vendor able to switch the service off. The code you deploy today, you can evolve it, hand it to another supplier, or freeze it for five years if your business does not move.

Security inherited from Django. Protections against SQL injection, XSS and CSRF are built into the framework, not enabled plugin by plugin. Fixes are centralised and shipped on a strict cycle. That is the whole difference with a site whose security depends on twenty third party extensions of uneven quality.

Headless or not, no lock-in. Wagtail ships a native content API. You can run it as a monolith (Wagtail renders the HTML), headless (Wagtail feeds a React or Vue frontend, or a mobile app), or hybrid. The architecture stays reversible.

Accessibility taken seriously. The admin targets WCAG 2.2 AA and ATAG 2.0, with a public conformance report published for every LTS release. An accessibility checker is built into the editor: it flags missing alt text and broken heading hierarchies as authors write. For organisations covered by the European Accessibility Act, in force since June 2025, that is no longer a detail.

Native multilingual. This is the point that matters most from Brussels. A bilingual FR/NL site, or a trilingual FR/NL/EN one, is handled by the standard install, with a translation workflow built into the admin. No third party extension, no extra licence, no custom integration. This very article is an example: it exists in French and English, with matching hreflang tags.

Proven at scale. The NHS and its 45 million monthly visits are the most visible proof. YouGov, for its part, manages more than 20,000 articles across 30 sites in 40 locales, headless, on the same foundation.

The only CMS that publishes its carbon footprint

This is an angle no commercial vendor will produce, for a simple reason: none of them measures it. Wagtail publishes the collective carbon footprint of the sites built on the platform every year. For 2025: 5,173 tonnes of CO2e a year across 6,431 measured sites, and an average of 1.37 tCO2e per site per year on the nonprofit side.

On the product side, that translates into native support for the AVIF and WEBP formats, automatic generation of image variants (no file served heavier than it needs to be) and a dark mode that saves energy on OLED screens. On the governance side: alignment with the ITU L.1420 and L.1430 standards and the GHG Protocol, partnerships with the Green Web Foundation and Green Coding Berlin. In 2025 the project joined a consortium of CMS makers to explore grid-aware websites, able to adapt their consumption to the real time carbon intensity of the electricity grid.

If you have ESG commitments to document, or if your mission is environmental, the argument speaks for itself.

Where Wagtail really changes the game: mission-driven work

The ground where Wagtail stands out most clearly is nonprofits, institutions and newsrooms. A few results published by the organisations themselves after moving to Wagtail:

Sources: case studies published by Wagtail and Torchbox. Amnesty International UK, Médecins Sans Frontières and Greenpeace are also users. On the business side, The Motley Fool left WordPress for security and publishing speed: on a loaded WordPress there are always twenty or so plugins that can lose support overnight.

Ten years of Wagtail, from Belgium

Our credibility on Wagtail does not come from a marketing claim, it comes from the sites we operate. A few of the Wagtail platforms we maintain from Belgium:

• kern-it.be, our own website, on Wagtail since day one. We do not recommend what we do not run ourselves.
• VENN Telecom, a Belgian critical connectivity operator whose website and business tools share our stack (see also our website for telecom and IT companies page).
• Sambrinvest, financial partner of SMEs in the Charleroi Métropole region.
• Fondation Reine Mathilde, a Belgian foundation working with vulnerable audiences, migrated from WordPress.
• It Takes A Village, a platform for transforming Brussels care homes, with Iriscare and the King Baudouin Foundation.
• MPlocation.be, a Belgian rental platform.
• PaHRtners, a recruitment firm specialised in industry and life sciences, with a bespoke job board.
• NewDeal Properties, a Belgian real estate agency with Whise integration.
• Eticwood, committed to forest sustainability and tropical agroforestry, active in Europe and Africa.

Nine references, nine sectors: telecom, finance, foundations, healthcare, rental, recruitment, real estate, environment, digital services. The same technical foundation, maintained over time.

Our location is not a detail. Brussels is Europe's linguistic crossroads and its de facto administrative capital. For a nonprofit, a Belgian institution or a cross-border foundation, a CMS that handles multilingual natively is not a convenience, it is a prerequisite. Our Wagtail agency covers bespoke builds, migration from WordPress, integration with your business tools (CRM, ERP, payments) and long-term application maintenance, from Belgium, in your time zone and in your language.

Is Wagtail right for you?

Let us be honest: not always. If you are launching a personal blog or a five-page brochure site on an entry-level budget, a well-built WordPress or a well-executed no-code site will do the job. We draw the exact line in Wagtail vs WordPress.

Wagtail is probably the best answer, however, if you recognise yourself in one of these lines:

• You publish content that carries weight: press, research, nonprofits, public sector, corporate editorial.
• Your volume runs from a few hundred to several tens of thousands of pages.
• Multilingual is structural, not decorative (Brussels, Europe, multi-country operations).
• You want ownership of your code and your data, not a subscription.
• You have ESG commitments to honour right down to your technical stack.
• You see your website as a digital asset meant to last ten years, not a project to redo in three.

The questions we get asked

Is Wagtail overkill for a small organisation? No. A nonprofit or a foundation runs perfectly well on modest hosting, with the same features as large accounts: the gap with the NHS is in the infrastructure, not in the CMS. See our website for nonprofits page.

What profiles does maintaining a Wagtail site require? A Python/Django developer. The talent pool is large and well trained, and technical debt on this stack is easier to anticipate than on a pile of extensions each following its own calendar.

What happens if the Wagtail project stops? The code is BSD licensed and built by more than 200 contributors worldwide, under open governance. Even in that unlikely scenario, the code stays yours: nobody can cut off access to your own website. That is the fundamental difference with a proprietary solution.

What about budget compared to WordPress? The upfront investment is higher, because we build bespoke. Total cost over five years is usually lower: no premium extension licences to renew, no emergency fixes when an update breaks a feature, no forced rebuild every three years. The real ranges are in our article on the price of a professional website.

In conclusion

Choosing a CMS is not choosing a trend. It is choosing the foundation of an asset that has to last. Wagtail is not the best known CMS with the general public: it is the one chosen by organisations that have already paid the price of a bad decision.

We have been supporting that decision for more than ten years, from Belgium, for organisations that do not want to rebuild their website in three years. Tell us about your project: we will tell you honestly whether Wagtail is justified, or not.

To go further

• Webflow or Wagtail: which platform to choose?