We recently announced that we’re now an official Craft CMS partner, which gives recognition to the fact our agency has proven itself as an experienced and qualified development team, in building modern and effective Craft websites. Whether it's one-off changes to an existing build or a new Craft project from start to finish, you can be assured that you're working with experts who understand how to deliver effective and conversion-driven solutions.
There's a good chance that if you have a website which you update regularly, you use a content management system (CMS). With WordPress being the global leader, there’s an even bigger chance your site might be built with this popular platform. If this is the case, there’s probably a high chance that there are things about your CMS that you find incredibly frustrating or might like to change.
Being market leader can be a bit of a double edge sword. Why? Because you have to cater for absolutely everyone. This one-size-fits-all approach whilst understandable, can create huge frustrations as you realise your content has to be built and structured in a certain way. In addition, WordPress can also be extremely vulnerable to security issues if not maintained properly. Afterall, if you want to target a huge number of global website users, you’re most likely to start with the market leader, right?
But aside from this, there are some fundamental reasons why Craft CMS is quickly becoming a popular WordPress alternative. In particular, there are some huge benefits centred around usability and performance. Google is hot on user experience these days with it’s Core web vitals and page experience metrics. So, creating a site built for usability, performance and speed is more important than ever before.
So, why do we love Craft CMS so much?
Here are 10 reasons why we think you’ll love Craft CMS as much as we do:
Live Preview - A feature that clients constantly request is the ability to be able to live preview the page they are editing before they publish content to the live website. This feature allows you to preview the page before it’s publicly visible to users. Craft CMS also saves revisions of the entries so if there is a mistake, you can always roll back to a previous version of your content, making mistakes or issues instantly fixable.
Responsive Control Panel - The responsive control panel within Craft is one of our favourite features. It means you can easily update your website and see how changes look across desktop, mobile and tablet, before publishing changes. There is nothing worse than making a change which looks great on a desktop, but completely breaks a mobile layout. This ‘mobile-first’ thinking really helps you take control of your content. Combined with a super clean interface, the responsive control panel makes working with Craft an absolute dream.
Custom Fields - Craft CMS makes it easy to split up your content and keep things organized. With a wide range of custom fields, you can create custom layouts in no time! There is also a huge library of plugins available too, which give you access to all kinds of integrations and extended features to help make your website best-in-class.
Matrix - There is no better way to create a flexible website than with the Matrix feature within Craft CMS. You can create reusable ‘content blocks’ which allow you to pick & choose which content types to have on each page. It also provides the ability to reorder these blocks so that your layouts become completely customisable without causing styling issues. This flexibility in content and page structure is absolutely unrivalled by any other CMS platform.
TWIG - One major benefit of Craft is that it comes with its own templating engine - Twig. Simply put, twig allows us to create more efficient templates using a syntax similar to plain HTML, making it easy to understand and work with. The result is that this simplifies many processes, making it quicker and easier to produce content you’ll love.
Multi-site and Locales - Craft CMS comes with the core ability to be multi-regional or multi-lingual and run multiple sites from the same CMS. You can create multiple entries, globals, assets and pages per location and either have these be unique or identical across multiple websites.
Asset management - Craft CMS has a desktop-class asset management built into its core. You can define volumes and subfolders and view your files in a list or with thumbnails. What’s more, you can store all your files in the cloud because Craft is built for speed. Choose whether to connect to Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, or Google Cloud Storage. When you set up a cloud-based asset source, it shows up alongside your local sources, and you can move folders and files between your local and cloud-based sources. Simple.
Image Editor - Craft 3 now features an Image editor that enables you to adjust your images with ease. Uploading at the wrong size or ratio? No problem! You can crop any image using a brilliant "Focal Point" tool. This helps ensure that what's most important about each image will always remain visible and in view, regardless of the crop of the image across all your responsive designs.
Community & Support - A frequent concern when using any new platform is whether there’s anyone else to help support you when you hit a brick-wall or come up against a new problem. Craft CMS has a brilliant community over at the Craft CMS Discord group where people just like you are ready and willing to help. There’s also an annual conference that you can attend called DotAll, as well as regular meet-ups across the UK (and beyond).
Commerce - Craft Commerce is built on top of Craft CMS and brings the ability to create one site which has the perfect combination of content and commerce all seamlessly connected. Craft’s content-driven approach to commerce fulfils the need to provide a solution that not only delivers exceptional browsing and buying functionality, but also powerful rich content management functionality. Craft Commerce is flexible and fully customisable so you can build exactly the store you need.
Craft CMS allows us to build modern, lightweight, dynamic and flexible websites. Most importantly, it’s fast, secure and easy to maintain. Quite simply, Craft removes the frequent headaches and complaints we see too often with clients using other platforms. We’d much rather spend our time working with you to provide engaging and conversion-driving solutions than trouble-shooting problems.
We love Craft and you will too.
