What is BirdPress™?
BirdPress is a lightweight, fast, and fully customizable content management system designed as a modern alternative to bloated platforms like WordPress. It lets developers and site owners create clean, mobile-friendly websites without unnecessary plugins or security overhead.
We built BirdPress because WordPress has become too complex, slow, and vulnerable for many use cases. Our goal was to strip everything down to the essentials: plain HTML, a few PHP tools, and a clean layout that works everywhere.
Why “BirdPress”?
- Ostriches are birds — and that's our family nickname.
- Birds are lightweight, unlike WordPress.
- It sounds like WordPress, but it’s lighter and faster.
Who Is It For?
BirdPress is ideal for individuals, small teams, freelancers, educators — anyone who wants a fast, portable, low-maintenance site that doesn’t need babysitting. It’s not meant for huge enterprise publishing environments. It’s for humans.
What Makes BirdPress Different
- HTML and PHP First: Write plain HTML. Add your PHP if you want. Just put plain pages with the wording and pictures you want into a folder, the system does the rest - styling, menus, etc., are automatic.
- No Plugin Hell: Features like galleries and contact forms are built-in, not bolted on. All modules are made by us and compatible without clashes. Easy to call with the name of whatever it is you want, e.g. inserting gallery() in your html will add a gallery. That's it!
- Fast by Default: No bloat. No clutter. No performance plugins needed.
- Minimal Surface Area: Fewer bugs, fewer exploits, less to maintain, no database to hack or inject. Works without write permission, so hackers can be prevented from uploading exploits by default.
- Built for Developers: If you know HTML and PHP, you already know BirdPress.
- Easy to edit: If you don't want or like a feature, just delete its corresponding css, js and php file.
- Easy to configure: If you don't like the menu layout, colour scheme, copyright notice, contact details, etc, these are all set in the config file, just edit it. At present there are 60 configuration options.
- Lightweight: Depending on which images you retain, it is about 4MB in size for the entire system, and a typical initial page load is 1MB
- Simple, few APIs: It has only two APIs at present: one to engage with the AI chatbot feature e.g. for customer service; and one for listing files uploaded. That's all.
- Auto-detect: It autodetects what you add. Each folder is named in a self-explanatory way. You do not have to directly configure the system or inform it that you have added something: it automatically assimilates them like the Borg.
Basic look demonstration
This page shows three features - the rounded textboxes; the fade-in effect for paragraphs on longer pages; and the scroll to top button that appears if you scroll far down.BirdPress Features
| Create subpages and main pages | ✔ | Responsive layouts | ✔ |
| Blog-style article support | ✔ | PDF upload (public and private) | ✔ |
| Custom logo and background | ✔ | Sidebar support (left/right) | ✔ |
| Tabbed content sections | ✔ | Custom colors, layout, logo, email | ✔ |
| Contact form with email delivery | ✔ | Image thumbnail auto-generation | ✔ |
| Five layouts/ Gallery types and slider | ✔ | Easy architecture to add new modules | ✔ |
| Built-in tools: tooltips, collapsibles, tabs, back-to-top | ✔ | Floating action buttons | ✔ |
| Popup messages & modal windows | ✔ | Sticky menu and breadcrumb options | ✔ |
| Google-powered search box, map, and advanced search tool | ✔ | Progress bars (static or dynamic) | ✔ |
| Floating video player with autoplay | ✔ | Visual effects: swooshes, fade-ins | ✔ |
| Many pre-existing tools eg file manager | ✔ | Upload/download functions | ✔ |
| Linux-compatible (static hosting) | ✔ | Requires a database (e.g., MySQL) | ❌ |