Why craft CMS is the best choice for custom websites in 2024

It’s brilliant for website owners, content managers and developers alike, and the perfect solution for a custom website, from multinational ecommerce sites to medium to large brochure websites that need more dynamic and complex content structures.

What makes it so good for custom website builds?

Craft is extremely flexible and customisable. This really comes into its own with custom content structures that developers tailor depending on the type of content and design of the component on the frontend. The way we structure Craft means content managers can store multiple similar entries in one easy-to-access place— making it super efficient to update one entry and have a change update sitewide automatically.

For example, perhaps your business has a call-to-action you’d like to display on multiple pages throughout the site. Storing these in a structure gives you a central location to update language or links. It’s a super time saver for content managers and makes sites easily scalable as your business expands or brand messaging changes.

Craft’s flexibility is also demonstrated in its templating system. Developers build custom components, layouts and pages by initially creating page builders. That means content authors can quickly edit or create pages and articles on the fly, using a list of available components, all designed and branded. Developers can specify which blocks are used on which pages, ensuring that pages stay true to the brand guidelines and aren’t broken or need developer intervention.

As Craft is modular by design, it allows content authors to piece together pages with components like Lego. As your business evolves and grows, pages can be easily edited by adding or removing these blocks or restructuring them completely. This allows your site to scale and evolve depending on your unique business needs.

Craft is incredibly user-friendly for clients with a clean and easy-to-navigate interface. When we build Craft websites, we logically set out the backend and all of its entries, pages, and assets, grouping them by content areas around the site set out by the original sitemap. Some CMSs can have overly populated menus and options because of their ‘out-of-the-box’ nature, making them confusing for people who aren’t familiar with how backends are laid out. As Craft is built from the ground up, it means you’ll have everything you need, and nothing you won’t—making for a more streamlined backend.

It’s not just content authors who can benefit from using Craft, it’s great for developers too! Craft was created by developers for developers. Fields are infinitely reusable, meaning developers can have a bank of ready-to-use fields that can simply be dragged into your blocks.

These can be split into tabs to keep things organised, with UI elements such as tips or line breaks to help the content author further down the road. The addition of Matrix fields expands on this further, allowing developers to create reusable dynamic content blocks. This can be anything from a card displaying services to a slide in a gallery. Matrix fields can be a great way to give content editors freedom without sacrificing the design.

There are also a whole host of useful tools for developers. Field handles are displayed next to fields, handles can then be copied to your clipboard with a single click ready for you to start using them in your code. The frontend debug tools are equally useful, and give you information on events, user info and performance.

With the help of DDEV, local environments can be spun up quickly and the database can be downloaded with a single click from your staging environment. This makes development much more straightforward and great if multiple team members need to work on a single site.

Security is a key factor when selecting a CMS for your custom website and with Craft, you know you’re in safe hands. User permissions are fully customisable by the admin, giving you peace of mind knowing members of your team can’t change site settings if they don’t need to. Craft also rolls out regular security updates and their codebases and dependencies have regular security reviews as they strive for secure code. Craft is also trusted by many multinational businesses and government organisations, so you can be certain your website is in safer hands.

Craft has a curated plugin marketplace, meaning plugin developers must undertake a strict vetting process to ensure their products meet high coding standards and follow the best practices to integrate seamlessly with Craft CMS. Craft plugins are often paid for and follow a subscription model, this incentivises developers to provide regular updates that improve plugin security and overall functionality.

The plugin store in Craft offers a massive range of plugins, from supporting you when creating an effective SEO strategy with SEOmatic, right through to support with caching, with the use of blitz. There are also many useful integrations, such as Stripe for accepting secure payments.

Craft has an incredibly strong community. This comes in the form of a great discord server, where ideas can be exchanged and help can be accessed from the very people who created Craft and most of its associated plugins.

Personally, this blew my mind as someone coming from a WordPress background, as WordPress was a much bigger community and I often found the overall support and support from plugin developers to be lacking.

There are also regular meetups within the Craft community, from local ones like “Craft CMS Notts Meetup” hosted by us, here at Abstrakt. To meetups on a much larger scale like Dot All and Dot One that are hosted in major cities worldwide.

We have been using Craft for almost a decade, and our Technical Director (and developer!) has amassed experience right from its inception ten years ago, training our development team in Craft as we expand. We’ve continued to work with some amazing brands and we have some amazing custom websites using Craft to show for it.

We recently launched a brand new site for Long Eaton Sofas, who make handmade upholstered furniture in Long Eaton, the UK centre of excellence in upholstery. As you can imagine, that needed a lot of customisation on site to reflect the bespoke nature of the business and the made-to-measure furniture they manufacture.

Another great example of Craft is Brickability, which is the UK’s industry-leading supplier of bricks and building materials. One of the biggest challenges was designing and developing a user-friendly and easy-to-manage— back and frontend—Brick Finder tool. This required a lot of complex relationships and filtering but works smoothly in terms of content management and visitor use.