Need a digital agency to adopt your Craft website?

But since its launch in 2013, Craft CMS has been continuously developed and constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of modern web development. Seven years and three versions later, Craft CMS is the rising star of the CMS world.

Unlike some other CMS platforms, including WordPress, which is often deployed using off-the-shelf themes, Craft is specifically aimed at professional developers who are responsible for building completely bespoke solutions. That’s why Craft is used by fewer agencies, but it is one of the most-used CMSes by the world's top digital agencies.

We often get approached by businesses who want or need to move away from their incumbent and are looking for a digital partner to adopt their existing Craft website. If you are looking for an agency to take on and further develop your Craft site, here’s how we can help.

Website Audit

The first step to taking over the management of the website is a full technical audit. Our team effectively reviews all moving parts of the website in order to get a full understanding of the site, the set-up and all of its functionality.

The output of this piece of work is a written report outlining our findings on:

• Build quality
• Stability
• Security
• Technical SEO
• Performance
• Plugins
• Development environment
• Deployment processes
• Recommendations for further sprints of work

Stabilisation and Quick Fixes

Following the audit, we look to gain control of the Git Repository and get the site set-up on its new hosting solution. We then carry out fixes to stabilise the site and make immediate improvements. These could include but not be limited to:

• Craft and plugin updates*
• Bug fixes
• SEO improvements
• Performance improvements
• Setting up Google Analytics events and goals tracking
• Craft training

*Many of the sites that come to us are still running on Craft 2. In these instances, we would strongly suggest a migration to Craft 3.0. Craft 3.0 is more than three times faster than its predecessor, as well as boasting hundreds of new features and improvements.

Support and Maintenance
We encourage our clients to use our team on an ongoing basis to maintain and update their site to ensure it continues to work hard for the user and deliver for the business. Our maintenance retainers typically include the following types of activities:

• Craft and plugin updates**
• Tracking, monitoring and reporting
• Technical support
• Snags and tweaks
• Small updates (that fall outside of sprints)
• Performance improvements
• R&D and recommendations for improvements

**Excluding major Craft updates (ie. Craft 2 to Craft 3)

Ongoing Road Map

As an agency, we believe in constant monitoring and continuous improvement to ensure that the website continues to work hard for the business. We are therefore proactive in terms of working with our clients to identify and implement opportunities and improvements.

We strongly advocate a sprint-based approach to digital design and development, using analytics and user feedback to inform decision making. This iterative design and development process allows both the agency team and the in-house project team to be extremely agile in our approach, using techniques such as MoSCoW to prioritise (and re-prioritise) features and functionality over time.