Why Craft?

I get asked that question a lot, “Why Craft?” It’s not a common name in the CMS world, it doesn’t sound familiar like WordPress. Why should you consider a CMS that you have never heard of? Aren’t all CMSs roughly the same? I have been doing web development for close to twenty years. Trust me, not all CMS’s are equal. Craft has become my CMS of choice for numerous reasons.

Pros

1. Flexibility

Craft gives creative teams the ultimate in flexibility, it is 100% customizable. Out of the box you start with a completely blank slate. It makes no assumptions about how you want to structure your content or your website. On the content side you can easily structure your data into multiple sections, each with it’s own unique set of fields and editing screens. Off the shelf Craft has a powerful set of fields that can be used to easily handle any type of data you want to present on your website. On the creative side, Craft uses a powerful templating system called Twig. Twig allows developers to easily write clean and concise HTML with simple hooks into the website content. Developers can use their normal coding workflow to create pixel perfect templates for your website.

2. Ease Of Use

A complex system doesn’t help anyone if it’s difficult to use. Thankfully Craft has put considerable time and effort into creating a clean and simple user interface. Every aspect of the control panel has been streamlined and designed to make setup, administration and content editing simple and fast. Content is grouped into easy to navigate sections and a powerful search bar makes it simple to find the content you want to edit. Clean, uncluttered editing screens make adding and updated content painless. There is even a Live Preview function that allows you to see your content changes in real time on your website with the option to preview in different screen types (mobile, tablet and desktop). For those times when you need to tweak an image but you don’t have access to image editing software Craft has a built in image editor that allows you scale, flip and crop your website images so they look perfect.

3. Plugins and Modules

The Craft plugin store has a curated list of professionally developed plugins to easily add features to your website when needed. All the plugins are vetted by Craft’s internal team to ensure they meet Craft’s high security standards. In addition to off the shelf plugins, Craft allows developers to easily build custom modules for unique website needs. Through modules a developer can easily integrate into payment systems, data APIs, messaging services, email newsletters, whatever your unique project requires.

4. Security

Unfortunately for WordPress, popularity has resulted in vulnerability. It has become a popular target for cyber attacks and hacking. Due to it’s complicated coding structure, unregulated plugin store and less than optimal upgrade process many WordPress sites are prone to security breaches. Most security patches for WordPress come long after discovery and exploitation by a hacker. Craft takes a proactive approach to security. Their development team routinely scans the entire code base to ensure there are no vulnerabilities. Craft was built from the ground up with security in mind. Measures are in place to protect against SQL injections, CSRF and XSS attacks, and malicious code in uploads. As part of the licensing fee you have access to ‘one-click’ updates to keep your website safe and secure.

5. User Permissions

In addition to Craft’s secure code base they have a robust user management system. System administrators can easily manage system access, editing capabilities, permissions and roles. Administrators can create roles to manage permissions across groups of users and tweak the permissions on a user by user basis.

6. Speed

Slow websites kill businesses. According to numerous studies 40% or more of your website visitors will leave if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Craft takes a bare bones approach to speed. Thanks to it’s powerful templating system (Twig) and streamlined code Craft only loads what it needs. Craft sites routinely score in the 90 - 100 range on Google’s PageSpeed tool. For websites that need the ultimate in performance, powerful caching mechanisms can be easily added to super charge your website speed.

7. SEO

A huge part of your website should be SEO. It is arguably the most important part of your website, even more than the design. Craft has a world class plugin, SEOMatic, that offers unparalleled SEO flexibility, customization and optimization. It handles all your SEO needs from meta tags and JSON-LD, to site maps to social media cards and tags. Don’t take our word for it though, Moz, a world leader in SEO, uses Craft and SEOMatic for their website.

8. Technical Support

As part of Craft’s licensing fee you have access to their developer support system. Craft also offers higher levels of support for urgent technical needs that need a higher priority in their support queue. In addition to the Craft technical support team, Craft runs a Discord channel for professional Craft developers where you can communicate with leading developers in the Craft community to help troubleshoot any issues.

9. Code Deployments

The current best practice for web development is to build a website on a development server, do QA and testing on a staging server and then launch it to a production server when everything is ready. This three pronged approach ensures fast, reliable updates to your website with minimal downtime, and the ability to easily rollback when something breaks. With Craft’s flexible project config feature, and a modern web hosting solution, we can deploy your website updates in a matter of seconds with no downtime and without the chance of human error.

10. A growing community

In ten plus years Craft has grown from a little side project into an award winning CMS trusted by leading digital agencies and brands around the world. Craft has attracted not only leading brands but world class web developers who want the best tools available. The growing and engaged developer community is always willing to offer support and advice.

Cons

1. The cost

Craft isn’t free. That is the most common complaint we hear about Craft. Having to pay for something isn’t always bad though. The minimal licensing fee ($299) includes a year of updates and access to technical support. Craft gives you an enterprise grade CMS for a fraction of the cost.

2. Limited plugins

It’s true, Craft has a relatively small plugin store compared to WordPress. WordPress has over 50,000 plugins, Craft has a fraction of that. But, Craft is so flexible and customizable, many of the features that require plugins for WordPress can be done off the shelf with Craft. All those WordPress plugins open your website up to countless security threats.

3. It’s not for amateurs

Craft was built for web professionals. It wasn’t intended for boilerplate, look-a-like websites that take a day to build. It was built to give designers and developers a powerful tool to create beautiful, expressive, performant websites. It offers users powerful, easy to use tools to make creating and managing their website a pleasure.

Conclusion

If you stuck with me until the end you deserve an award (or maybe a discount on your website project). So there you have it, my answers to your question.

My question to you … Why not Craft?