For years now, WordPress has been the dominant content management system (CMS) for large and small brands alike, making it a job in demand – check out job vacancies for WordPress Developers.
While WordPress has its positives, there are other CMS options out there that might be more suitable for your web build.
Enter Craft CMS.
Here’s Sam, our Senior Web Developer, to tell you more.
3 Reasons to Use Craft CMS
At Passion Digital we have used Craft CMS for a number of clients in the past. We find it a flexible and highly customisable option that can cater to all of the digital marketing needs that our team has, from content to e-commerce and SEO to CRO.
Here are a few of the reasons why I would recommend Craft to clients.
1. It’s great for both developers and content editors
It’s rare to find a CMS that is rated by developers but is also intuitive and user-friendly for non-technical users who don’t know code but still need to update and upload content to the website. Our content team loves Craft because of its functionality, such as:
- Drag and drop fields – WordPress users, think Elementor or Visual Composer
- Live preview – a side-by-side preview allows you to edit the on-page elements and see the results as you go
As a developer, I like the fact that the templating system is Twig, which allows for rapid development. Craft is built using open source, so it’s regularly updated, well documented and has an expansive plugin library. The plugin community is very active and supportive – you should be able to find a plugin for most needs, including SEO, additional custom fields and contact forms.
2. It’s highly customisable
Unlike CMSs like WordPress, you can build a blog in Craft exactly how you need it to work rather than adapting a pre-existing template. It supports a multitude of custom fields, such as text, repeater fields and matrix fields, and you can create variations of the same ‘Entry’ (blog post) if you need different templates. For example, a cookery blog could contain both a ‘blog post’ template and a ‘recipe’ template.
It’s also useful that you can create your own relationships between assets. You can decide the hierarchy of pages, blog posts, custom feeds, categories, tags, assets and users, which allows you to build a website that works for the client and their business structure.
3. It is forward thinking
One of the things our SEO team likes about Craft is the fact that it’s highly cacheable – every object can be cached and invalidated when that object has been updated. This helps with site speed, which has been a key ranking factor for a few years now. It’s inevitable that CMSs that don’t have the ability to optimise site speed are going to fall behind as it becomes more and more central to SEO.
It is good to know that you can use Craft as a headless CMS with the GraphQL API. Whether you’re ready to take the plunge and go headless immediately or want the option to swap over to a headless CMS in the future, Craft is a safe option.
Are You a Craft Convert?
If you’re interested in the potential of Craft CMS for your website, get in touch with our web development team. With heaps of experience building new websites and optimising them for digital marketing activity, we’re sure that our experts will be able to help.