Is the systeme.io blog good enough to replace WordPress?

What is being compared here

Everything below is what systeme.io publishes about its own blog, in the twelve articles that make up the Blog section of its help centre. Nothing here describes what WordPress does, because that belongs in WordPress's documentation rather than systeme.io's.

What the blog is built to do

A blog is created from the Sites tab, under Blogs. Creating one asks for a name, a blog domain, a URL path and a template.

Inside, the blog has its own menu with three kinds of content: Posts, Pages and Categories. It does not arrive empty. A new blog comes with sample posts, five sample pages and three categories already named.

A post is created with a title, a short description, a URL path, an image and one or more categories, then has to be Activated before a visitor can see it.

The parts that behave like a theme

Two layouts do the work a template would do elsewhere, and both are edited in the page builder.

• Blog layout. Sets the header, footer and content placeholder. Anything added here appears on every blog page and every post, and can only be edited back inside the layout editor.
• Post layout. The same idea for posts. It arrives holding four dynamic elements: the post's categories, title, image and content. A Blog post date element can be added to show the publication date.

The menu is defined inside the blog layout, so it stays consistent across every page and post. Each item is either a link to a blog page or a custom URL, and items can carry submenus.

Three pages cannot be removed: the Home page, the Post list page and the Search page. The About and Contact pages that come with a new blog can be deleted. Any single page can be told Don't use blog layout so it looks nothing like the rest.

The search plumbing it handles on its own

• A sitemap. Every connected domain generates one at /sitemap.xml, grouping the sitemaps of the blogs and funnels on that domain. It updates the moment a post is created, and the domain's robots.txt file references it, so nothing has to be submitted by hand.
• An RSS feed, generated when the blog is created and updated on every publish.
• SEO fields per category, a title and a description, separate from the ones on a page.

What the documentation never mentions

These are absences in systeme.io's own blog articles, not claims about what the product cannot do.

• Comments. None of the twelve articles refers to a comment system.
• Plugins or add-ons. Same. Nothing describes extending the blog with third-party software.
• An author. The fields on a new post are title, short description, URL path, image and categories. There is no author among them.

Three limits are stated outright rather than left out. The RSS feed carries only the 20 most recent posts. It is not suitable for podcast distribution and does not support media content. And the domain sitemap currently covers funnels and blogs only, with other assets described as coming in future updates.

The form is the awkward part

systeme.io documents no opt-in form element on a blog page. Its documented route builds the form as a step inside a sales funnel and then places its script on the blog page through a Raw HTML block.

systeme.io documents running both

There is a help article for putting a systeme.io form or popup onto a WordPress site. The form goes in through Appearance, then Widgets, into a sidebar or footer area. The popup script goes into a header and footer plugin, or into the theme's footer.php before the closing body tag. systeme.io says those are not the only ways.

That route keeps the email list, the funnels and the payments in systeme.io while the pages stay where they are.

Where a blog is the wrong tool anyway

systeme.io's own guidance puts the blog with regular publishing and search traffic, and the sales funnel with direct selling and simple sites of up to five pages.

For a general multi-page site there is now a third option that is neither. The Websites feature, also under Sites, builds and manages a multi-page site from one place, with a menu each new page is added to by default, global styles, and login, contact and search pages already made.