Why you should update your website to Craft CMS 3

Our developers and designers have always loved working with Craft, but with Craft 3 comes a whole new level of devotion. We take our hats off to you Pixel and Tonic! In development for over three years, and completely rewritten, redesigned and refactored for better performance, Craft 3 is more than three times faster than its predecessor, as well as boasting hundreds of new features and improvements.

So here’s the million dollar question… if you are currently running a site on Craft 2, is it worth investing in the update to Craft 3?

Well… a lot of the improvements are focussed around the underlying framework that Craft is built on, so as a site admin you are unlikely to notice any major differences to the admin console following the update. However these framework changes mean huge improvements in page speed and site performance, with significant reductions in TTFB (time to first byte), Query Speed, and Memory. It’s no secret that page speed has an impact on both organic SEO and user experience; the page speed improvements will have a positive impact on your sites overall site performance.

Furniture retailer Zitmaxx Wonen reduced their typical load time to 3 seconds and saw conversion jump 50.2%. Overall revenue from the mobile site also increased by 98.7%. Source: WPO

Our developers take site performance extremely seriously and work hard to ensure a low-latency user experience, so we’re delighted with these across-the-board performance improvements. With this in mind as an agency we believe an update to Craft 3 is most definitely worth building into your 2019 digital roadmap.

Although the enhancements in Craft 3 make it a no brainer, Craft 2 will continue to be supported with bug fixes until 31st January 2020, and security fixes until 31st January 2021, so there's no immediate rush. Having said that if you plan on working on a significant feature implementation, bundling it in with an update to Craft 3 makes sense from an efficiency point of view. If you want to move your website onto Craft 3, or just want a bit more information, please get in touch with one of our team.

If your website is running a CMS that isn’t Craft, check out why we favour Craft CMS to find out the benefits of Craft and why we believe it is worth making the shift.