Everyone shits on Wordpress nowadays, but if your site has any kind of complexity (ie it has more than twenty pages outside of the blog), has multiple contributors (especially non-technical contributors), and you are not going to be maintaining it for life (ie you expect that other developers or people will, at some point, be working on it), then it's the right choice.

A few reasons:

1. Most people who've worked on websites in any capacity have at least done a little work with Wordpress. If you ever need to have anyone else work on a site built on Wordpress, it will be easy to find people who can do so and will be up to speed quickly.
2. Most anyone who has had to add content to a website (ie the marketing team, etc) has worked with Wordpress before. You are decreasing onboarding time by an order of magnitude and you can lean on these people in an organization to help their coworkers learn the interface.
3. There is infinite documentation online about Wordpress. Anything you want to do, or have imagined you should be able, has been documented in-depth. StackExchange has a whole Q/A site specifically dedicated to Wordpress.

I get it, php blows, it's not static, it's not sexy. But it works really, really well. And you can make it do almost anything you want. It's nearly bulletproof. And if you need other contributors either in development or content, you will find them in spades.

I'd recommend using Craft. It doesn't box you in the way that WordPress does. You can build custom content types with the fields you need, not just what's given to you. It uses Twig for it's templates, which means it is pretty human readable and also easy to build out the front-end. I'd suggest checking out their documentation.

Try Kirby CMS. Flat-file CMS as good and flexible as Wordpress.

Kirby for small projects and Craft for big ones.

https://www.designernews.co/stories/58069-grav-is-a-modern-open-source-flatfile-cms

Perch is probably the best 'little' CMS (recommended for a site with under 20 pages). It is so easy to integrate Perch tags that you can even make the entire static site first and then make it dynamic later. It's about $50 to start.

If you want something more complex, I definitely agree with those recommending Craft. As a developer I have had the best time building sites with it and the dashboard is simple and clean for clients. Not only that, but there is a live preview that actually works, so clients can put together some pretty in depth pages without having to code. They have plans ranging from free to $300.

I think Contentful is the way to go right now and can be integrated in to static sites.

It's been working for me, check it out.

Recently I've grown fond of Kirby CMS for all kinds of client websites. I've been spoiled by its simple nature for both front-end and back-end development.

The only thing I've noticed is that my clients aren't familiar or comfortable using Markdown for submitting their content. Considering most of them use Word to write their content, they lose their formatting when copy-pasting. There is a WYSIWYG plugin though. Haven't tried it yet.

Hi Norris,

I'm CEO of CloudCannon, a CMS and optimized hosting provider for Jekyll sites. We work with many large organisations to bring all the advantages of static site generators and give non-developers the ability to easily update content. CloudCannon also syncs with GitHub / Bitbucket so you work on the sites locally, rollback changes, branch etc.

Check it out, would love to hear what you think!

For my clients, I either package Wordpress or hook myself together a custom CMS with Firebase.

Commenting for later

I'm a huge fan of Wagtail, a relatively new (but mature enough to use in production) CMS built in Python on top of the Django web framework.

The editor looks nice and is definitely one of the more usable CMS editors, the developer experience of actually building a site on top of it is top notch, but the killer feature for me is something called StreamField.

StreamField lets you define a field that has a bunch of blocks - you might have one that contains paragraphs of formatted text, one that's a header, one that's a pullquote with an author, one that's an image with a caption and attribution field, and so on - you define templates for each of them, then your users can assemble them together. With this you can achieve awesome, nearly print-like layouts, and it's much easier than trying to beat CKEditor (or whatever rich text widget people use these days) into submission.

For me, StreamField gives you a content model that's a happy medium between something like Mezzanine (which just uses simple fields, so you have to yield control of what's inside your rich text fields to CKEditor) and something like DjangoCMS (which is way too flexible in that it allows arbitrary combinations of arbitrary plugins nested arbitrarily deep, which gives users just enough rope to hang themselves with and make their site look like arse) - Wagtail lets you define some fields as StreamFields and others as containing plain text, or a number, or an option chosen from a list, or other simple field types when you need to make that sort of restriction.

The downside is that you need to have someone that knows Python and Django building the site; there's no getting around that. There's no built-in default page types or anything like that. There's not a lot of code to write, and the code you do write feels nice and clean - see what I said above about DX - so all the building blocks are there, but you need a Python programmer to put them together. Plus, because it's written in Python, you need to host it somewhere that supports Python, which means you can't use shared hosting*, the sole exception being WebFaction.

* Some shared hosts say they support Python but they almost always don't really. They usually run a really old version, and they usually don't allow long-running processes so you can't use a WSGI server. It's the same story as with Ruby (just replace WSGI with Rack in the previous sentence).

I've used Statamic with good luck, and it's pretty fun to develop with as a flat file.

I recommend ProcessWire: http://processwire.com/

It's very intuitive to use as an editor. The API is very powerful, and very well documented. It's fast, the templating logic is straightforward, and best of all: The system doesn't "assume" anything (e.g. in WP, everything is based on the assumption you want to build a blog). You don't need to hack a default "theme" to death, until you get exactly the markup you need.

Also, out of the box, every input field is a "custom field" - no need to install 3rd party plugins or modules. Multilanguage sites? A breeze, due to the in-built features.

I can highly recommend http://umbraco.com it's .net based and not PHP like Wordpress and drupal, but it is very easy to learn – especially if you have experience from other CMS. The great thing about Umbraco is it's backoffice capabilities, I is very easy to make relative complex layouts and datahandling, and still keeping it userfriendly for editors.