Building a website for a business is not just about having a presence online but creating a powerful tool that fuels your brand's growth. However, with many content management systems (CMS) to choose from, the decision can be overwhelming. Craft CMS and WordPress are two of the popular contenders that Adelaide web developers use, but the question is: "Which one should I choose?"
Having been available for over 20 years, WordPress is the most successful CMS platform, with a usage share of 43.1% and 30 million active websites. In comparison, Craft CMS, despite its popularity among agencies and businesses, has a usage share of less than 1%, with only 50,760 active websites. However, just because you're popular doesn't necessarily mean you're the best choice.
So, what is Craft? Craft is a commercial-grade, open-source CMS that provides a robust, flexible and easily administered website. As forward-thinking Adelaide web developers, Quisk Design has been using Craft exclusively for over 9 years for our website development projects, and we consider ourselves to be Jedi Masters. After working long and hard in the WordPress Galaxy far, far away in our early days and constantly being frustrated by it, we switched to Craft CMS after being convinced of its ability to assist us in providing leading website design services for our clients. Our key reasons were:
- Security
- Ease of Use
- Speed and Performance
- Community Support and Plugins
Ensuring Your Website Security
WordPress is the most widely used platform, but it's also an easy target for hackers. Approximately 90% of hacked CMS sites are WordPress, a massive downside of the platform. 41% of these hacks are due to vulnerabilities in WordPress, while 52% of all vulnerabilities come from WordPress plugins. Having an outdated WordPress version is a significant cause of hacks. Using plugins can save time and money, but it also means relying on third-party developers for updates and support. Your website updates can be problematic if plugins become incompatible with each other. In addition, every third-party integration, theme, or plugin can become vulnerable if not kept up to date by the plugin developer. This can be an entry point for hackers to access data or hijack your site.
Craft does an excellent job of preventing SQL injection hacks, which are common vulnerabilities of using WordPress themes and third-party plugins. Another great feature of Craft is the ability to get very specific with user permissions. You can create specific roles and grant or deny access on all levels and areas of the website. WordPress only gives you six roles with locked-in permissions, which is scary because accessing the WordPress code straight from the CMS is possible. The ability to edit code in Craft requires cracking open the source code, which is usually only accessible by the webmaster.
Comparing Content Management Capabilities
Websites include videos, images, text, navigation menus, and contact forms, and with Craft CMS managing your website, this is all straightforward. These components (or blocks) can be easily rearranged or removed to create different layouts. If you notice that users need to scroll more on your site, you can quickly test different ways for them to navigate the page information more efficiently by simply rearranging the pages’ components around.
Craft CMS also has utilities to help make pages and media load quickly, such as automatic compression and optimisation, which ensure that large files don't slow things down. We use Craft CMS to build new pages fast, allowing our clients and content creators to make changes quickly and easily. It also has features that make it easier for people who edit the website to work more efficiently.
One big difference between Craft CMS and WordPress is the pre-made templates. Craft CMS doesn't use themes, and that's a good thing. Not having a theme allows for more original and customised designs that truly reflect your business and stand apart from the uniform look of most WordPress sites. Craft CMS has a content-first approach and is meant to be designed and coded from scratch for every new build. This does require more planning to create the most efficient workflow for managing content. However, this approach means sites are built exactly for our client's needs.
WordPress was initially developed as a blogging platform and still stands on that basic foundation. Many of the websites produced use licensed themes that either get slightly modified during website development or remain completely unchanged, resulting in a “cookie-cutter” website. To make their themes easier to update, developers often rely on third-party plugins for even the most basic functions like carousel sliders and forms. With so many WordPress websites using the same pool of popular plug-ins for functionality, we can’t help but feel that this is part of the reason why many WordPress sites leave you with a “meh” online experience.
As Adelaide web developers, another issue we have with WordPress is the slower performance in the CMS administrator's section. This can be extremely frustrating for large sites with extensive content and assets. Craft's admin panel is significantly faster and more reliable.
The CMS is for people who like to take their time and do things right. It’s for those of us who truly approach our work with the utmost skilfulness and craft. We craftsmen actually like writing every last HTML tag by hand, and we wouldn’t touch an off-the-shelf theme with a ten-foot stick. It’s for web agencies that strive to make their clients happy by delivering the best solution possible. And it’s for site owners, who just want a simple tool to keep their website updated with fresh content, without going up a steep learning curve.
Brandon Kelly, CEO and President of Craft
Evaluating Speed, Performance and Efficiency
It's crucial to remember that website load times significantly impact conversion rates. Google suggests that if a page has a slow load time, then bounce rates can increase by up to 32%. However, if the load time is very slow, the likelihood of bouncing can increase by 123%! Slow speed and performance result in lost sales and leads and decreased key performance indicators (KPIs), such as conversion and clickthrough rates. For a mobile experience, the average time for the first byte should be 1.3 seconds or less, and slower speeds can lead to penalties from Google. WordPress is known for sluggish load times, but Craft significantly improves performance with its minimalist and clean building approach
Craft CMS offers several speed and performance benefits compared to WordPress, making it a strong contender for those prioritising efficient web development. One of the core advantages is its efficient architecture, which focuses on core functionality, translating to faster page load times and overall better website performance. Unlike WordPress, which often relies heavily on plugins, Craft CMS provides more built-in features, which reduces the need for additional plugins that can slow down a website, streamline the user experience, and enhance speed.
Additionally, Craft CMS excels in handling complex pages thanks to its architecture, which is designed to manage and deliver content rapidly. This makes it an excellent choice for websites with heavy custom functionality and unique content types, ensuring quick and efficient data retrieval.
Users often report that Craft CMS's backend feels quicker and more responsive, particularly when managing large amounts of content or complex site structures. This responsive backend is crucial for maintaining productivity and ease of use, even as the site grows. Craft CMS also requires less optimisation effort out-of-the-box to achieve good performance, unlike WordPress, which often demands additional tweaks and optimisation, especially for complex sites laden with numerous plugins.
Craft CMS utilises an MVC (Model-View-Controller) model, ensuring that only the necessary components are delivered when requested, which is particularly important for websites handling large amounts of traffic since it helps keep server costs low and maintains performance under heavy load. Compared to WordPress, which does not have an MVC framework. It requires plugins to access some of the efficiencies of MVC systems.
Finally, Craft CMS's flexible structure supports tailored optimisation for large websites, providing scalability that can be cumbersome to achieve with WordPress due to potential plugin overload on extensive projects.
Comparing Community Support, Themes, and Plugin Options
WordPress is built using PHP, a widely used programming language on the web. With a thriving third-party market, WordPress provides an array of pre-made plugins, themes, and sample content to expedite the development process. This starkly contrasts Craft's outlook of having no themes to work from, which forces creativity from the ground up. Most third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms have some WordPress integration.
You won't likely encounter a web developer who hasn’t heard of or worked with WordPress. Unfortunately, because accessibility to the platform is so easy, having such a wide range of website developers with varying levels of skill sets has a downside. Some people can build a website full of features without touching code. Others will prefer a mixture of both. At the end of the spectrum, the most competent web developers will build a fully customised WordPress theme from the ground up. Ultimately, you get what you pay for. You'll also likely find answers and hired help are much more accessible with WordPress, but that may come at the expense of experience.
Like Google Play or Apple's App Store, there's a WordPress plugin for everything. One drawback of a massive open market is that not all plugins are created equally or kept up to date. WordPress plugins can be problematic to keep track of because they are managed at the third-party level. Nevertheless, it's essential to regularly update your plugins to minimise security vulnerabilities and protect your website from potential hacking attempts. Additionally, when installing new plugins or updates, users be aware of the possibility of encountering the "white screen of death" issue, which can be alarming.
Craft also offers a plugin market directly within the CMS, which simplifies the management of updates and licensing. It is well-maintained and raises the bar for less-than-optimal plugins. All purchases are regulated within Craft's market and go through your Craft ID, providing a single location to manage all licensing and payments, which is especially beneficial for managing multiple web properties.
The downside of the smaller plugin market is that it means investing more in custom development. However, we have not found this an issue when building more robust websites since we generally aim to use only the necessary plugins. WordPress plugins are notorious for bogging down a website's performance.
Craft CMS for the Win!
If you haven't got the hint by now, we love Craft—as do our clients! They never look back once we teach them how to manage their content with one of our training sessions once their new website goes live. Our clients especially enjoy its simplicity and control, allowing them to create or update their content without fear of "breaking their site."
At Quisk, we also offer a variety of website maintenance packages for sites we build. We ensure that your Craft site is in tip-top condition, complies with best online practices, and that all CMS and plugin updates are investigated thoroughly before implementation.
Did you still need to be convinced by Craft? Perhaps you want to see it in action? Feel free to speak with one of our Adelaide web developer team members, and we'll be more than happy to provide a demonstration and explain why we chose Craft in even more detail.
