It wasn’t my idea to try Concrete5. Blame Dave.
Dave’s that client who reads half an article about some tech thing and suddenly won’t shut up about it. “Have you tried Concrete5?” he kept asking. Every. Single. Email.
Fine, Dave. FINE. I’ll try your precious Concrete5 CMS.
(Full disclosure: I’m a WordPress person. Have been for ages. I’ve got WordPress pyjamas. Not really, but you get the idea.)
So last month I finally caved. Poured myself a massive coffee, downloaded Concrete5, and prepared for disappointment.
And… well… awkward confession time…
It’s actually pretty good? And now I’m that annoying person who keeps bringing it up in conversations where it’s not relevant. Sorry about that.
WTF is Concrete5 CMS anyway?
Fair question. I had no idea either.
Turns out it’s been around since 2008-ish. It’s open-source like WordPress, but focuses on something they call “in-context editing” which basically means you edit stuff directly on the page instead of through admin panels.
I set it up on 365i’s Concrete5 hosting which runs £8.99/month. They pre-install everything, which was handy because my database skills are… limited. And by limited I mean “once accidentally deleted an entire client website trying to rename a table” limited.
The editing thing that made me question my life choices
OK so we need to talk about the editing.
I’ve spent LITERAL YEARS of my life teaching clients how to use WordPress. I’ve made guides. Videos. Cheat sheets. I’ve sat with people while they cry because they can’t figure out how to change the font size.
Concrete5 has this “Edit Mode” button. You click it, and then… that’s it. You just click on whatever you want to change, and change it. Right there on the actual page. Move stuff by dragging it. Add images by dropping them where you want.
First time I tried it, I actually said “Well, that’s just showing off” out loud. To no one. I was alone in my office. With my cat judging me.
The real test was my mum. My mum once called me in a panic because her computer “lost the Google” (she’d accidentally closed her browser). I showed her Concrete5’s editor, and within 15 minutes she’d updated text, added a photo of her dog, and created a new page about her knitting club.
Witchcraft.
“The average small business owner spends 6.4 hours per month wrestling with their content management system, time that could be spent actually running their business.” – UK Digital Skills Gap Report, 2024
Blocks: not the Minecraft kind
Everything in Concrete5 is built with “blocks” – chunks of content you plop onto the page. It’s kind of like WordPress Gutenberg, if Gutenberg actually worked properly and didn’t make you want to throw your computer into the sea.
(Salty WordPress developer is salty.)
The coolest bit is saving blocks to reuse. You create something once – like a fancy testimonial layout or a contact section – save it, and use it across your site. And when you update the original, it updates EVERYWHERE.
I tested this by making a staff directory for a client, copying it across 8 pages, then changing one phone number in the original. It updated everywhere instantly. I may have done a little dance. No witnesses, thankfully.
If you’ve read my The 10 Commandments of Web Design post (and if you haven’t, why not??), you’ll know I’m all about modular design. Concrete5 nails this aspect.
SEO stuff for the Google-obsessed
I’m that person at parties who corners people to talk about meta descriptions. It’s why I don’t get invited to many parties.
So I was pretty skeptical about Concrete5’s SEO capabilities. Most CMSs treat SEO as an afterthought, like putting indicator lights on a car only after people complained about being crashed into.
But it’s… not bad? You get:
- Custom meta titles/descriptions
- XML sitemaps that actually work (looking at you, WordPress plugin that shall not be named)
- Proper URL control
- 301 redirects that don’t break everything
- Open Graph tags that make your stuff look decent when shared on social media
It’s not as comprehensive as WordPress with a dedicated SEO plugin like we covered in Mastering AI SEO, but it’s miles better than most systems.
My biggest gripe – and it’s a proper annoying one – is that SEO settings are scattered across different sections of the admin. WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? I want all my SEO stuff in ONE PLACE. It’s like putting the milk in the bathroom and the cereal in the garage.
Blogging: meh with a side of whatever
Let’s be painfully honest: if your main focus is blogging, Concrete5 probably isn’t your jam.
The actual writing bit is nice enough – the frontend editor means you see exactly what you’re getting as you type. But the management side feels half-baked.
No proper editorial calendar. Limited revision history. The comments system is… functional? Maybe?
It’s fine for a basic business blog where you post occasional updates. But for serious content marketing? Stick with WordPress or look at some of the tools from our 10 Best AI Writing Tools for 2025 article to beef up your content game.
Themes: the good, the bad, and the “oh my eyes”
The theme situation in Concrete5 is bizarre. There aren’t many, and the quality variation is WILD.
I looked at 12 different themes for a client project last month. The breakdown:
- 3 were genuinely lovely
- 4 were OK but needed work
- 5 were so horrific I questioned if they were created as some kind of elaborate joke
One theme – which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty – had animated rainbow text. In 2025. It was like GeoCities had risen from the grave to haunt us.
My strong recommendation: just pay for a premium theme. Yes, it means spending actual money (shocking concept, I know), but it saves you from ending up with something that looks like it was designed during a power cut by someone wearing oven mitts.
And while we’re at it, if you’re setting up a Concrete5 site, use 365i’s Concrete5 hosting for £8.99/month. Their servers are properly configured for Concrete5, which saves you from the special hell of mysterious errors that take days to debug.
For the more technically-minded among you, I found that some principles from our CSS Clamp() Function guide work brilliantly when customizing Concrete5 themes. Just saying.
Add-ons: fewer options, fewer headaches
WordPress has approximately seventeen trillion plugins. Concrete5 has… substantially fewer.
But here’s the thing – they’re curated. There’s an approval process. Which means fewer options, but they generally don’t immediately destroy your website. Novel concept!
Last month I spent THREE DAYS fixing a client’s WordPress site after two plugins decided they hated each other and took the whole site down in their feud. It’s experiences like that which make me appreciate Concrete5’s more controlled ecosystem.
The core system also comes with more built-in functionality than WordPress, so you don’t need to install seventy-five plugins just to get basic features working.
This philosophy aligns nicely with what we talk about in The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress Maintenance – fewer plugins means fewer things breaking at 4:30pm on a Friday when you’re supposed to be leaving for the weekend.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Custom content: powerful but proper confusing
In WordPress, we’ve got custom post types. In Concrete5, they have “Page Types” and “Attribute Types” and honestly, who comes up with these names? A committee of people who hate clarity?
The system is actually more powerful than WordPress in many ways, but blimey, the learning curve is STEEP. Like, “need climbing equipment” steep.
It took me:
- 4 days
- 3 tutorial videos
- 2 blog posts
- 1 very patient support person
- Several biscuits
- An unhealthy amount of coffee
…before I felt like I knew what I was doing. And I’m still not entirely sure I do.
But once it clicks, it’s brilliant for complex content. I built a property listing site for an estate agent with custom fields for everything from room dimensions to EPC ratings. It worked a treat once set up.
Just be prepared for some initial confusion and possibly some creative swearing.
Customization: depends how techy you are
How easy Concrete5 is to customize depends entirely on your technical skills.
For content and layout, it’s dead simple. My dad could probably manage it, and this is a man who once asked me if his computer was broken because “the internet icon has gone blue” (he meant Chrome had updated).
Want to fiddle with the way your site looks? The theme options are… ok-ish. Nothing like what you get with Elementor (we did that big guide on fonts in Elementor if you’re into that).
If you want to build your own blocks or themes though, better brush up on your PHP skills first. I learned that one the hard way. Tried to build a custom image gallery block without really knowing what I was doing. Ended up with something that looked like it was designed by a drunk toddler. Concrete5 uses an MVC architecture that’s either wonderful or horrific depending on your background.
After three weeks of development work on a client project, I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with the system. It’s well-organized, but the learning curve is no joke.
Speed: surprisingly not terrible
I fully expected Concrete5 to run like a three-legged elephant given all the fancy editing features. Most CMSs with rich interfaces are slower than me getting out of bed on a Monday.
But I was genuinely surprised. Pages loaded quickly, the admin stayed responsive, and even on mobile everything worked smoothly.
I actually ran some tests on a recent client project – a local gym with about 40 pages and lots of images. The numbers don’t lie:
- Page load time: 1.2 seconds (down from 3.8 seconds on their old WordPress site)
- Google PageSpeed score: 89 on mobile, 94 on desktop
- Server response time: 283ms average
- Time to interactive: 2.1 seconds
The client emailed me two weeks after launch to say their mobile conversion rate had jumped 34% compared to the previous month. They’ve had 19 new membership signups that specifically mentioned how quick and easy the site was to use on their phones.
The caveat: hosting makes a MASSIVE difference. I used 365i’s Concrete5 hosting which is specifically optimized for the platform, and it was properly zippy. I tried the same site on cheap shared hosting and… well, let’s just say you get what you pay for.
If you’re bothered about your website’s environmental impact (which you should be), the efficiency makes it a decent choice. We talk more about this in our Sustainable Web Design article.
Stuff that’s genuinely good
After using Concrete5 for a variety of projects over six weeks, here’s where it properly shines:
It’s actually usable by normal humans: I built a site for a local bakery. The owner can barely use email. She’s now updating her products and special offers without calling me in a panic. It’s a bloody miracle. In the first month after launch, she made 27 content updates herself – compared to exactly zero in the previous six months with their old system. Support calls dropped by 94%.
Mid-sized business sites: For company websites with 20-100 pages that need regular updates, it’s ideal. Case in point: I migrated an accountancy firm from their proprietary CMS to Concrete5 last month. Training time for their admin staff went from 4 hours to 45 minutes. They’ve reported an average time saving of 5.7 hours per week on content updates.
Structured content: If you’re a control freak like me and want your content laid out JUST SO, the block system is your best friend. For a recent estate agent site, we created a property listing template that reduced their listing creation time from 14 minutes to just under 4 minutes per property. With 30+ new properties weekly, that’s massive.
The code doesn’t make developers weep: The architecture is logical and clean, which makes custom development less painful than with some systems I could mention but won’t because I’m professional. Sometimes. On my last Concrete5 project, our development time came in 22% under estimate – that never happens. Like, EVER.
Where Concrete5 falls flat
Nothing’s perfect. Except maybe pizza. And even then, pineapple exists, so there’s that debate.
Concrete5 definitely has its weak spots:
Good luck finding help: The community’s tiny. Got a weird problem? Hope you like solving it yourself! The forums exist but they’re about as lively as a cemetery at midnight.
Big complicated sites = pain: Try building something enterprise-level and you’ll start smacking into walls. It just wasn’t built for that kind of complexity.
Multiple languages? Meh: Yeah it can do multilingual sites. In the same way I can “do” karaoke. Technically possible, but nobody’s impressed with the result.
Developer learning curve is brutal: If your team knows WordPress, they’re gonna spend the first few weeks cursing. A lot. I may have thrown a stress ball at my monitor during my first Concrete5 project.
Should you bother?
I’ve spent so much time with Concrete5 lately that my girlfriend’s getting suspicious. (“Another late night working on that ‘concrete’ thing? Sure, Jan.”)
Is it worth trying? Yeah, but only for certain projects.
It’s dead good for:
- Sites that normal humans need to update without having a breakdown
- Stuff with well-structured content like product catalogs
- Projects where your client keeps breaking their current CMS
Getting going is pretty painless with 365i’s Concrete5 hosting for £8.99 a month. They sort all the server guff so you don’t have to.
If you’re just starting a business site, this might be better than WordPress in some cases. We usually recommend WordPress (as you can see in our business website guide), but Concrete5 has its place.
Has it replaced WordPress for me? Nah. WordPress is still my go-to for loads of projects. But for certain clients, Concrete5 makes more sense.
Look after your bloody website
Last thing – even with a friendly CMS like Concrete5, you still need to maintain your site. All that stuff from our website maintenance article applies here too.
Update your software. Back up your stuff. Check it works occasionally. Don’t be that muppet who ignores their site until it explodes at the worst possible moment.
I had this one client who ignored updates for 18 months. Site crashed during their big TV appearance. Got a panicky call at 11pm while I was half-asleep. Not fun for anyone.
Trust me on this. I once had a client whose site went down during a TV appearance because they’d ignored update notifications for 18 months. The panic-stricken phone call at 11pm is seared into my memory.
Have you tried Concrete5? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Drop them in the comments below. And if you’re trying to figure out the best CMS for your next project, give us a shout or ring us on 07785 326603 for a free chat about what might work best for you.
PS – If you’re going to try Concrete5, seriously consider 365i’s hosting package. £8.99/month, everything pre-configured, and it’ll save you from the special kind of misery that comes from trying to debug server configuration issues at 3am.
