Craft CMS Development Services to Meet Every Content Challenge

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Craft CMS?

  Craft CMS is a user-friendly, flexible content management system perfect for developers, designers, and content creators who seek to build bespoke websites and web applications.

  Unlike one-size-fits-all CMS platforms, Craft CMS offers a customizable interface and powerful features that enable users to tailor their site's functionality and appearance to match their unique requirements.

  With its intuitive content modeling and easy-to-use control panel, Craft CMS gives developers all capabilities to create rich, engaging digital experiences without imposing constraints on design or structure. Ideal for businesses and projects of all sizes, it provides a robust framework for developing secure, scalable, and sophisticated websites with ease.

• What are the advantages of using Craft CMS?

  Here are some of the main benefits that make Craft CMS an attractive option for professionals looking to deliver top-tier digital experiences:

  Developer-Friendly

  The platform offers a clean, well-documented codebase and an extensive API, making it a joy for Craft CMS web developers to work with. It supports deep customization and enables developers to tailor the site’s functionality and appearance precisely to their project’s requirements, without being constrained by the platform.

  Powerful Content Management

  At its core, Craft CMS provides sophisticated content modeling tools that allow users to define and manage content structures in a way that best suits their project. The CMS boasts an intuitive and user-friendly control panel, which empowers content creators to easily create and publish content, and manage it effectively over time.

  Customizable and Scalable

  Unlike many other CMS platforms, Craft CMS is designed to be lightweight and agile, free from unnecessary built-in features that could affect performance. It offers the flexibility to include only the features you need, ensuring your website remains fast and responsive. Additionally, its scalability makes it suitable for projects ranging from small websites to large-scale enterprise applications.

  Security and SEO-Friendliness

  Craft CMS makes security a top priority, with regular updates and patches to protect against vulnerabilities. Its SEO capabilities are also noteworthy, offering users the ability to optimize their content for search engines directly within the CMS, enhancing visibility and reach.

  Advanced User Management

  Coming with an advanced user management framework, Craft CMS allows administrators to set up detailed permissions and access levels for different users. This fine control ensures that sensitive content management tasks can be appropriately delegated and safeguarded.

  Live Preview

  This feature of Craft CMS makes the content creation process effortless and enjoyable. It allows content creators to instantly view how changes or additions to the content will appear on the actual site. This immediate feedback enables quick adjustments and fine-tuning, ensuring the content looks exactly as intended before it's published.

• What are the core differences between Craft CMS and WordPress?

  Craft CMS and WordPress are both popular content management systems used for building websites, but they cater to different user needs and preferences through distinct core features and functionalities. Here are the core differences between Craft CMS and WordPress:

  Customization and Flexibility

  • Craft CMS is designed with a strong focus on custom development. It offers extensive flexibility for developers to tailor the CMS to the specific needs of every project, making it ideal for bespoke websites and applications. Craft's approach is developer-first, providing a clean, well-documented codebase and extensive APIs for deep customization.
  • WordPress began as a blogging platform and has evolved into a versatile CMS. While it offers significant flexibility through thousands of themes and plugins, customizing WordPress beyond its core functionality or heavily modifying themes can sometimes require extensive coding or workarounds. Its ease of use for beginners and vast ecosystem make it highly accessible for a broad range of users.

  Content Management and Structure

  Craft CMS also shines in its sophisticated content modeling capabilities. It allows for complete control over content fields, structures, and relations, including:

  • Matrix field. With Craft, you can create modular content blocks, which allows you to dynamically arrange various content types (text, images, videos, etc.) within pages or posts for custom layouts.
  • Custom fields and field types. The platform offers a wide array of custom field types, including text fields, rich text editors, checkboxes, date pickers, dropdowns, and more, for building detailed content models tailored to specific project needs.
  • Section types. Craft CMS includes distinct section types such as Singles (for one-off pages), Channels (for repeating content like blog posts), and Structures (for hierarchical content organization), facilitating varied content structuring approaches.
  • Relations. The system provides robust capabilities for establishing relationships between different pieces of content, enabling intricate connections that enhance navigation, filtering, and content discovery.
  • Multi-site and localization. Craft CMS supports multi-site setups from a single installation, making it easy to manage and localize content across multiple websites or languages, while maintaining centralized control.
  • Templating and queries. The platform leverages the Twig templating engine, giving developers precise control over content querying and HTML output.

  In summary, there's probably no type of content that Craft can't handle.

  • WordPress uses a more straightforward approach to content management, with posts, pages, and custom post types. While this structure supports a wide variety of websites, managing highly customized content architectures can become complicated without additional plugins or custom development.

  User Interface and Experience

  • Craft CMS offers a clean, intuitive control panel that can be extensively customized to match the workflows of content creators and administrators. The Live Preview feature enhances the content editing experience by allowing you to see changes in real time.
  • WordPress provides a user-friendly dashboard with a visual editor and block editor (Gutenberg), aimed at simplifying the content creation process. While its interface is widely regarded as easy to use, the experience can vary significantly depending on the themes and plugins installed.

  Performance and Security

  • Craft CMS is known for being lightweight and fast, as it doesn't include unnecessary built-in features. It also has a strong focus on security, with regular updates and a proactive approach to safeguarding sites.
  • WordPress, while also secure, requires more attention to security due to its popularity and vast ecosystem of plugins and themes, which can occasionally introduce vulnerabilities. Performance can vary based on the hosting environment, theme, and WordPress plugins used.

  Community and Support

  • Craft CMS has a growing community of developers and a supportive ecosystem, though smaller compared to WordPress. Pixel & Tonic, the company behind Craft, offers official support and resources for users.
  • WordPress boasts a massive global developer community, extensive documentation, forums, and third-party resources. The wide availability of themes, plugins, and professional support services make it a robust platform for users at all levels.

  In general, Craft CMS is often chosen for projects requiring custom development, sophisticated content architecture, and a tailored user experience. WordPress, on the other hand, is widely used for its ease of setup, extensive plugin ecosystem, and strong support community, making it suitable for a broad range of websites from blogs to e-commerce platforms.

• What are the core differences between Craft CMS and Webflow?

  Craft CMS and Webflow are both popular tools for creating websites, but they serve slightly different purposes and come with their specific features. Here are their key distinctions:

  Craft CMS

  • Flexibility and customization. Craft CMS is known for its flexibility and extensive customization options. It's designed for developers who want to create bespoke websites. With Craft CMS, you have complete control over your website’s design and functionality. There are also many plugins available to make your Craft website even more powerful and feature-rich.
  • Content management. Craft offers a more robust content management system that is ideal for complex websites with various content types. It’s particularly powerful for sites requiring a tailored content structure.
  • Self-hosting. Craft CMS requires you to provide your own hosting. This gives you more control over your site's environment but also means you're responsible for managing security, updates, and backups.
  • Learning сurve. Due to its focus on flexibility and customization, Craft CMS has a steeper learning curve, especially for users without web development experience.

  Webflow

  • Visual design and ease of use. Webflow provides a visual interface for designing websites, making it accessible to designers without deep coding knowledge. You can design, build, and launch websites directly from the platform.
  • Integrated hosting. Webflow offers integrated hosting, which includes automatic updates, backups, and security. This simplifies website maintenance and is ideal for users looking for an all-in-one solution.
  • Responsiveness. Webflow emphasizes responsive design, allowing users to easily create websites that look great on any device without having to manually adjust designs for different screen sizes.
  • Limited customization. While Webflow is powerful for designing visually appealing sites, it may not offer the same level of deep customization or flexibility as Craft CMS, especially for complex back-end functionalities.

  On the whole, If you require a highly customized website and have the technical skills (or access to them), Craft CMS might be the better choice. On the other hand, if you prioritize ease of use, integrated hosting, and a visual design process, Webflow could be more suitable for your development project.

• What popular companies use Craft CMS?

  As of May 2024, Craft CMS was used by over 42,000 live websites, with a considerable share falling on the developed countries such as the United States (almost 14,000), United Kingdom (almost 6,000), the Netherlands (slightly over 3,000), Belgium (close to 3,000), and Germany (over 2,500).

  Not surprisingly, many well-known companies that represent those countries decided to leverage the power of Craft CMS for their marketing purposes, including:

  • Ikea
  • Netflix
  • Adidas
  • Ideo
  • Stanford Research Park
  • Volkswagen