Why agencies choose Craft — and why it might be right for you.

For our team at Authentic, we want to build strong relationships with our clients, helping them grow their site, app, or product over the long term. In order to do this, we need to use a platform that's not one-and-done. We need a tool that can flex as the needs of the project change, and grow along with the size of their team.

For all these reasons we find that Craft CMS is a much better long-term tool for our clients as compared to WordPress. It's one that can evolve with their needs as their business evolves.

Craft makes absolutely no assumptions about the kind of site you’re building – each site is built differently, depending on the content you have and how you want to present it. WordPress, on the other hand, is great if you want to build exactly one kind of site (a blog). As soon as you start to diverge even a little bit from the generic WordPress site, you either have to bog your site down with a bunch of memory-hungry, potentially insecure, overkill 3rd-party plugins, or else dive into writing a ton of code. Flexibility is built into Craft, and so creating a unique kind of site – or even a regular site with a couple of slightly different features – is much easier for your developer.

WordPress themes often try to be a one size fits all solution, when really your website should be tailored to you, your business and your customers. Also, it can also be hard for your website to stand out when using a WordPress theme whereas Craft sites are built from the ground up every time and with that, the website has a unique feel.

WordPress outputs a lot of default HTML that a developer will need to go in and manipulate when things inevitably start to deviate from the theme. The nice thing about a content management system like Craft is that it makes no assumptions about your site’s content, so you’re building exactly what you need–not forcing yourself into the exact same theme that Sally’s Dog Grooming across town is using.

[The] difference in the platforms’ philosophies is apparent in their templating tools. WordPress supplies and spits out a lot of its own default HTML that requires manipulation of the API to change. Craft comes with nothing. No HTML at all. Which is glorious.

There is no API to coerce into the markup that you want and there is no lazy settling for the default because there is no default. As the O.C.D., semantic-obsessed front-end developer that I am, this is perfect.

As a web developer, my personal preference is Craft CMS. It’s a fresh breath of air to work with, and requires very little to no time for ramping up with the platform. While WordPress wins in the apps and community support, Craft CMS is still the content king with it’s improved performance, security, and flexibility.

The bottom line is that Craft is a better solution for highly custom websites, and allows developers much more flexibility in where and how content is displayed or repurposed in different places.

You can do anything with WordPress and make it really flexible, but no matter what you do, you're working with something that's bloated, throws a bunch of "rules" at you, has security flaws, and is far more a pain to work with from a development standpoint.

Sure, developers have found ways to make the functionality in WordPress work - but it’s not intuitive. Craft CMS gives you a blank slate to work with so there’s no need to shoehorn plugins to “make it work”.

To bring WordPress up to speed with Craft CMS, you’ll immediately be swimming in plugins just to achieve what should be base functionality.

Craft also offers a plugin market, which makes it easy to manage updates and licensing directly within the CMS. It’s quickly growing in size as more developers want to capitalize on the low pool of competition, and recurring annual fees. Because it is regulated within Craft’s market, all purchasing goes through your Craft ID. Having a singular location to manage all your licensing and payments is a real joy if you’re managing several web properties. WordPress plugins, on the other hand, are managed at the third-party level, which can be a pain to keep track of.

If you've used WordPress in the past, managing plugins can be a nightmare. Craft's plugin ecosystem is much smaller, but it's much more well built. Every week new plugins are being related extending Craft's functionality and making it a more capable tool.

With Craft CMS you will normally have less reliance on plugins than you would with WordPress. Most WordPress hacks are due to vulnerabilities introduced by third-party plugins and most WordPress sites use several of these (many in some cases).

This might sound like I'm making it up, but every client we've transitioned from WordPress to Craft has been completely blown away with how much easier Craft was to use. Seriously, send me an email and I will give you references.

The design of Craft's interface is simple and easy to understand. We always do hand-off calls with clients after our projects launch, and 9 out of 10 times, people are able to pick up and start working immediately.

A key part of this is Craft’s control panel interface, which is clean and simple. Anyone who has used WordPress will be familiar with the cluttered sidebars, especially with sites that have several plugins. Craft keeps things organised, minimal and elegant, allowing you to focus on the job in hand.

Trying to see how your changes look on the live site can be a pain and in WordPress you can end up with multiple tabs open in your browser. This leads to confusion about which tab is the current live version and you can end up making mistakes and losing work. Craft has the fantastic Live Preview feature so you can see how your content will look before it goes live and even share your work with others using private preview URLs.

Craft also allows you to save as draft rather than publish straight away and of course, you can schedule content to be made public automatically in the future (or be removed automatically). This is fairly standard stuff but Craft takes things to another level by offering version control so you can see who changed what and when. Multiple authors can also work on pages and drafts can be merged into each other, ensuring you don’t overwrite another author’s work.

While we’ve met many experienced WordPress users who have suffered the CMS long enough to learn how to navigate the site without constant headaches, we’ve yet to meet an experienced content manager who didn’t fall in love with the ease-of-use Craft CMS provides right out of the box.

Yoast has a deservedly great reputation but fortunately Craft CMS has an even more powerful solution in SEOmatic. SEOmatic facilitates modern SEO best practices and is a turnkey SEO system that is comprehensive, powerful, and flexible.

One of the most respected authorities on SEO moz.com actually use SEOmatic to manage their own SEO, which is something that speaks volumes!

SEO’s not just about plugins; it comes down to performance too.

To perform well, websites need to be easy to navigate for both users and spiders. Craft websites trump WordPress here because it allows you to create a more unique and user-friendly website - one that isn't hampered by unstructured menus, buried pages and excess tags.

But these issues don’t just affect the UX and how crawlable your site is, they slow it down too.

WordPress is known for having one of the best SEO plugins in Yoast SEO, which has long given it an advantage in this category. However, Craft CMS has not just caught up in the SEO game, it has blown past WordPress with its own elite SEO plugin, SEOmatic.

Because Craft can accomplish just as much as WordPress (or other open source CMSes like Drupal) can, without using third-party plugins, it’s much, much less susceptible to security vulnerabilities. Looking at the public CVE (security vulnerabilities and exposures) database shows there are 1034 exploits for Drupal, and 1412 for WordPress. Compare this to only six for Craft CMS. Craft is routinely tested by third-party security tests, and is built in a way that values the security of you and your users’ data very highly.

While WordPress is the most widely used platform, it has also become an easy target for hackers. In fact, about 90% of all hacked CMS sites were WordPress, which is truly the biggest downside of WordPress. 41% of these hacks are due to vulnerability on WordPress’ own hosting platform, while 52% of all vulnerabilities derive from WordPress plugins. Having an outdated WordPress website also constitutes a majority of the hacks. Every third-party integration, theme, or plugin becomes a vulnerable entry point for hackers to access your data, or potentially take over your site altogether.

Because it’s so much more secure, you’ll end up paying less to keep your site running – no need for your developer to spend a lot of time keeping up with or fixing security holes. Because it’s so much simpler to expand due to its flexibility, if you need a new feature or way of displaying your content some time after your site has launched, this can be done efficiently and quickly. With a WordPress site, on the other hand, this might involve tacking yet more plugins on, rewriting giant sections of the codebase, or even in some cases completely rebuilding the site.

Staggeringly, 90% of hacked CMS sites in 2018 were powered by WordPress. And things haven’t improved since then either. On 9 December 2021, 1.6 million WordPress sites were hit by 13.7 million attacks in 36 hours.

The good news is that WordPress does release updates regularly to try and fix security issues. But the not-so-good news is that there’s often a disconnect between WP’s plugins and updates.

Essentially, if a plugin is unsupported, old or hasn't been renewed, an update can effectively break your website. And with thousands of plugins available, it's no surprise that there's going to be a few security flaws too.

On the other hand, Craft includes one-click updates for users. So at the press of a button, you can ensure all of your plugins have the latest features, bug fixes and security enhancements

Of course W3C want a website that’s fast, makes the most of modern technology, is custom-designed, and responsive across devices – all of which Craft does beautifully. But the most important factor to them was accessibility. So they looked at ‘accessibility first’.

Their current system, WordPress, has some fundamental accessibility flaws – particularly around the Gutenberg text editor – so they ruled it out for their website revamp. W3C then "scoured the web for accessible CMSes" – and decided that Craft outshines other systems. They were especially impressed that (like Supercool 😉) Craft have an in-house accessibility expert.

We have concerns about the longevity of WordPress as we use it. WordPress released a new version of their editor in 2018: Gutenberg. We have already rejected the use of Gutenberg in the context of this project due to accessibility issues.

Craft CMS is on a journey towards achieving WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. This commitment is reflected in its continuous efforts to improve accessibility standards. Craft CMS's accessibility conformance report provides detailed information on how it meets each success criterion in the WCAG 2.1 standard. This commitment to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance is not just about meeting a standard; it's about ensuring that all users, regardless of their abilities, can use and enjoy the websites created with Craft CMS.

When it comes to a platform community, Craft’s is second to none. Craft has an active community on Discord as well as an in-depth and comprehensive documentation library and support database. The Craft developer community is growing fast and is incredibly supportive, actively promoting discussion, encouraging knowledge sharing and supporting development queries.

If developers do need support while building out a site in Craft, it’s super easy to get help. Craft’s technical and customer support teams are active on StackExchange and are quick to respond when we run into issues. This way, we can be sure that your site launches without any confusing technical issues.

Compare that to WordPress, which leaves developers to figure things out for themselves in a forum. That takes up more of their time and can drive the final cost of your website higher.

On the subject of contacting plugin developers, Craft has a professional community that’s passionate about enhancing the product. These developers are often working in established businesses and will write custom modules - as opposed to publishing plugins. And if they do contribute to plugins, they’re open-source ones. So rather than replicating plugins, they’re improving the ones that are already there.