Recreating Wordpress workflow with Jamstack
Cole Krumbholz, founder at Formspree, on the future of full-stack development
Netlify was trying to turn Jamstack from a developer trick into a full website operating system. Wordpress won by bundling editing, plugins, themes, hosting, previews, and one click setup for non technical teams. Jamstack started with faster deploys and cleaner architecture, but Netlify pushed the missing pieces, like build hooks, deploy previews, serverless functions, and broad framework support, so content teams and agencies could run real production sites without going back to a PHP monolith.
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The real competitor to Wordpress was not the CMS alone, it was the workflow. In Wordpress, a marketer edits a page and hits publish. Netlify recreated that loop by connecting Git, CMS tools, automated builds, previews, and rollback, so a non developer could trigger site changes without asking an engineer to deploy manually.
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Netlify also helped seed the surrounding market. The value of Jamstack rose as headless CMSs, commerce APIs, search tools, and form backends became easy to plug in. That let a team keep Wordpress for editing if needed, Shopify for commerce, and still ship a fast custom frontend on one deployment layer.
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This is why Gatsby often looked like the closest Wordpress analogue, while Netlify and Vercel looked more like Heroku for the frontend. Gatsby packaged a richer plugin style experience, while Netlify packaged hosting, previews, functions, and integrations. Together they formed the rough equivalent of the old Wordpress ecosystem.
The market keeps moving toward this unbundled model. The next winners are the companies that make headless feel as easy as old Wordpress, while keeping the speed, flexibility, and API based architecture that developers prefer. That means better visual editing, more plug and play integrations, and tighter workflows between content teams and code.