The Advantages of CraftCMS over WordPress

WordPress was released over 20 years ago, in 2003. It is a CMS, or Content Management System. Simply put, this means it provides users, generally the owners of the website, with an interface through which to manage the content on their website.

Originally it was designed to publish blogs, but as it developed, its functionality expanded, and it became widely used for all kinds of websites. At Formation Media, we have recently moved to using CraftCMS instead of WordPress, and this article will explain why we’re making that change.

5 advantages of using CraftCMS over WordPress

1. Flexibility

Due to WordPress being originally designed for blogging, it has many features unnecessary for websites which aren’t blogs.

These include:

• Comments
• Dashboard elements (including WordPress’ events and news)
• Themes
• Appearance

Comments add unnecessary spam/vulnerability risk to a website. Themes and Appearances give users the ability to edit areas of the site which isn’t necessary with a bespoke-built website. The Dashboard elements include a lot of unnecessary clutter.

We recently rebuilt a client’s WordPress site using CraftCMS. Before we rebuilt it, there were 30 different elements in the sidebar, which makes for a terrible user experience. After rebuilding the site on CraftCMS, there are now only 6 elements in the sidebar (although there are a few more for admin users). This makes the site much more straightforward for users and improves productivity.

WordPress is often used with prebuilt themes, and it includes many features which allow those themes to be modified. However, to meet the needs of our clients, we build bespoke websites with highly specialised functionality. CraftCMS is built precisely for those developers looking to build bespoke websites.

We build the frontend of our CraftCMS websites in Next.js, which is a React framework. This allows us to build the website from scratch, as opposed to WordPress, where it’s more like adapting an already existing structure to a client’s needs. In using Craft as a headless CMS, we are then able to build a really fast frontend with Next.js.

Also, as CraftCMS exposes a GraphQL API to access data, it's possible that different platforms could make use of this data, meaning if our clients wanted to develop a mobile app, we could easily pull in the relevant data.

Metaphorically speaking, developing a website on WordPress is like taking a house which already exists and adding extensions to fit the needs of the owner. Whereas CraftCMS is like designing and building a house from scratch, from the foundation upwards, allowing the developer full control over the final result.

2. Speed

Switching to CraftCMS has meant we’ve been able to use the latest software architecture for our websites. Rather than using a traditional CMS like WordPress, we’re able to use CraftCMS as a headless CMS.

Simply put, a headless CMS means that the frontend and backend are separated, where the CMS is 100% backend, rather than traditional WordPress where frontend and backend are often intrinsically linked.

By serving only the data, a headless CMS is much faster and provides better performance. This also allows us to utilise static site generation, where pages are built fully formed and therefore much faster to load because they don’t have to wait for any requested data from a server, which also improves performance and user experience.

3. Security

WordPress’ success is also one of its biggest weaknesses. The ubiquitous nature of the CMS on the internet mean it is a popular platform for hackers to attack.

CraftCMS uses a modern framework, meaning it’s less vulnerable to security issues. CraftCMS is also less reliable on plugins for functionality, since it includes features by default, unlike WordPress which requires many plugins to get even the baseline functionality we need for developing websites.

Additionally, the higher level of customisation in CraftCMS means we’re able to manually add functionality, such as SEO settings, rather than being dependent on plugins, which can have vulnerabilities. Updating CraftCMS is also more straightforward than WordPress, meaning we can install the latest security updates more quickly and efficiently.

4. Accessibility

Accessibility is extremely important for those looking to ensure their website is compliant with the legal requirements, such as public sector customers, as well as for those who want to provide the best possible experience for their customers.

WordPress does not include the best accessibility infrastructure by default. (At the time of writing, WordPress does not currently conform with ATAG 2.0). CraftCMS, on the other hand, audits all features for WCAG 2.2 and ATAG 2.0, giving the best possible basis for accessibility-compliant development.

5. User Experience

CraftCMS has a handful of features which gives it a better user experience than WordPress. We previously mentioned that it has a less-cluttered interface than WordPress, and how the increased flexibility means developers are easily able to remove unnecessary features, which helps reduce clutter.

However, there are some other features which help specifically with user experience. CraftCMS includes a live preview feature when editing pages, which allows a user to immediately see how their page will look without publishing, as well as allowing them to edit content and instantly see how this changes the page. Version control is also included by default in CraftCMS and allows you to see what changes have been made to a page, making it easy to revert changes.

Conclusion

In summary, there are various benefits to using CraftCMS rather than WordPress, whether it’s the increased flexibility for developers, improved security and accessibility, or the better user experience provided to admins.

Formation Media has developed as a digital marketing agency over the years, and we constantly review our tech infrastructure to make sure we meet our client’s needs. This move over from WordPress to CraftCMS is part of that development, as it means we’re better positioned to support our clients where needed. Contact us today to learn more about using CraftCMS for your website.