5 Reasons to Choose Craft CMS for Your Website
From the Journal – Posted 30.10.2025
Choosing a CMS is often a long-term decision. Here are 5 reasons why we work with Craft CMS, and why it’s a good choice for your website.
In many ways, when it comes to Content Management System (CMS) options, businesses have never had it so good. From market leader WordPress (43.5% of all websites) to the likes of Squarespace and Wix, there’s a CMS out there for everyone and, by and large, it’ll do a good job.
On the other hand, the CMS landscape has also never been more crowded. Between WordPress, headless frameworks, and a growing wave of no-code site builders, users have endless options.
The array is dizzying. And while many are good at what they do - things are in a much better place than they were 10 years ago - selecting the wrong platform can slow you down, limit the control you want to have, and box you into an ecosystem that isn’t completely right for you.
Russ Back, Development Director, MUD"There are plenty of great CMS platforms out there. We choose Craft because it gives us everything we need to design and deliver website experiences we'd want for ourselves, for our clients."
What do we know? Mud is a verified Craft CMS partner agency, and we have been working with the platform since 2014. We love it, and it works for our clients. Below, we’ll dig into exactly why Craft is our CMS of choice, and has been for the past 10+ years. But first, a history lesson...
What is Craft CMS?
Founded in 2013 by software company Pixel & Tonic, Craft CMS is a modern, design-led platform built for brands that value flexibility and control. It may be a decade younger - and far less widespread - than WordPress, powering around 43,000 websites worldwide, but don’t mistake its smaller footprint for a lack of capability.
Craft was created as a developer-first CMS focused on clean code, structured content, and performance. That foundation still defines it today. And many choose it for that reason over the beefier WordPress.
💡 You can read more about the WordPress vs. Craft CMS debate in our comprehensive guide...
As more organisations seek scalable, secure, and user-friendly alternatives to bloated legacy systems, Craft’s reputation continues to grow. And while its market share remains modest, its client list isn’t: IKEA, Volkswagen, Adidas, Netflix, and Hootsuite.
5 Reasons You Should Choose Craft CMS for Your Website
1. Total creative & content flexibility
Many CMS encourage a theme-first approach, where your design and content need to fit into a pre-set template. Craft takes a content-first approach instead.
This gives designers and developers complete control over how a site is structured and how the front-end is built, enabling a fully custom design. That makes Craft CMS a brilliant choice for building a website that’s shaped around your brand from day one.
Teams can create modular, reusable components that allow editors to build rich, on-brand pages while maintaining layout consistency. The result is a website with a unique look, feel, and user experience, not a lightly customised version of a pre-existing theme.
2. Clean, fast & secure by design
Craft CMS is known for being lean and lightweight at its core. It includes the essentials you need without bundling in unnecessary features or forcing you to rely on a large stack of third-party plugins to get started.
This streamlined approach supports strong performance out of the box. A cleaner codebase makes it easier to optimise for fast load times, solid Core Web Vitals, and SEO best practices.
💡 Don't miss our guide to optimising your website for AI search...
It also contributes to security: fewer plugins generally mean fewer external dependencies to maintain, reducing the potential attack surface. Coupled with Craft’s regular security updates, this gives teams greater confidence in the platform’s long-term stability.
3. High-quality, supported plugin ecosystem
Many teams using more plugin-reliant CMS platforms will be familiar with the challenges of managing large stacks of additional functionality. Each new feature is just another dependency to maintain; updates can introduce compatibility issues, and avoiding updates introduces security issues.
Craft takes a more considered approach. It provides most core functionality out of the box, and its plugin ecosystem is intentionally focused on quality rather than volume; it offers “just” 800 plugins versus WordPress’ 60,000.
As a result, projects typically require fewer third-party plugins, which can reduce complexity, minimise conflicts, and keep maintenance more manageable over time.
💡 Discover our list of the 10 best Craft CMS plugins in 2025...
When you factor in ongoing updates, support, and long-term site evolution, this leaner approach can lead to a lower total cost of ownership over a multi-year period.
4. It’s actually good to use
Naturally, a lot of what users want from their CMS boils down to ease of use. Simplicity is key. And platforms like WordPress, depending on the complexity of your requirements, can be a little daunting and often confusing.
For content editors, Craft’s control panel feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s clean, modern, and intuitive; there’s very little technical knowledge required.
Features like live preview, drafts, revisions, and flexible permissions make collaboration smooth and stress-free. Editors can create new pages or update existing ones without worrying about “breaking” design layouts, which reduces friction between marketing and development teams.
Nick Livermore, Marketing Manager, Mud"After 10 years managing Craft CMS websites, I still appreciate how simple it is to use. Live preview, in particular, takes the bit of the hassle out of setting up new content - you see pretty much what your audience will almost instantaneously."
Our clients regularly tell us that Craft’s editing experience is one of their favourite aspects of the platform. When your team likes the CMS, your site stays fresher, more consistent, and better maintained.
5. Future-proof and developer-friendly
Under the hood, Craft is built on modern, well-supported technologies, including the Yii PHP framework and Twig templating. This foundation encourages clean, maintainable development practices that many teams find efficient.
As Craft explains, “Twig is a simple—yet powerful—language that allows us to translate the data we’ve defined in Craft into a blob of HTML that can then be sent back to a browser and displayed for a user.” Twig’s clarity and separation of logic and presentation make front-end templating more structured and predictable, which is good for everyone involved.
But to bring things back to the real world, this translates into smoother build processes, cleaner integrations with third-party tools (such as CRMs and marketing platforms), and a codebase that’s easier to extend and maintain.
Craft’s architecture supports iterative enhancements as well as larger redesigns without having to start from scratch, helping organisations adapt over time without unnecessary disruption.
Why We Recommend Craft CMS
Choosing the right CMS is an important decision. And it’s not about what works today. While you can migrate between CMS platforms, it’s generally advisable to lay foundations that can evolve with your business and ambitions.
Our opinion is that Craft CMS offers a rare combination of creative freedom, robust performance, and long-term scalability that makes it an excellent decision for many.
It gives developers a modern, flexible foundation to build upon, while offering content teams a platform that’s genuinely enjoyable and simple to use. And that’s really what it boils down to - you need a CMS that you understand and want to work with. The result will be a better-maintained website over time.