Picking a CMS for your first real site feels like a small decision at the time and then turns into a huge one a year later. A few things worth thinking about upfront:
- How painful is migration later? Some platforms lock content into proprietary formats that are miserable to export if you outgrow them.
- Plugin/extension quality varies wildly. A huge plugin ecosystem sounds great until half of them are abandoned and create security holes.
- Performance out of the box matters. Some CMS's need heavy caching/tuning just to feel normal, others are fine by default.
- Who's actually going to maintain it? If it's just you, pick something you can realistically keep patched, not the most "powerful" option.