The 10 Best Craft CMS Plugins in 2025 | MUD

Plugins are a crucial component of any website build. Instead of building from the ground up each time, plugins enable web developers to easily and efficiently bring certain core functionalities to every build. This includes everything from editable mega menus and customisable forms to SEO functionality on the back end.

WordPress is well known for its plugin ecosystem, with approximately 60,000 plugins available at the time of writing. Craft CMS, on the other hand, has a seemingly paltry 800 plugins available to its users.

Given that numerical disparity, you’d be forgiven for thinking Craft CMS is on the back foot in terms of functionality. But that simply isn’t the case. In fact, one of the most frequent complaints about WordPress, especially from scaling businesses, is plugin bloat and incompatibilities.

One of the major benefits of Craft CMS is its leanness, and it’s important not to detract from this and throw every plugin at every project. That said, we have a set of trusted plugins that play nicely together, making our websites easier to manage and more likely to perform well.

If you’re planning a new site or refining an existing one, here are the Craft CMS plugins we recommend in 2025 — the ones we know work, because we rely on them every day. There’s even one we created ourselves in there!

Our Favourite Craft CMS Plugins for 2025

Navigation

plugins.craftcms.com/navigation

Navigation is one of the most popular Craft CMS plugins, and for good reason. It makes managing menus, site structures, and nested links far easier than trying to wrangle them manually. Editors can quickly build and reorganise navigation trees through a clean interface, without needing a developer to step in for every change.

What makes Navigation stand out is how seamlessly it integrates into Craft’s control panel. It supports multiple menus, drag-and-drop ordering, and custom fields for links, so whether you’re building a simple header menu or a complex multi-level structure, you get full control without added complexity.

For development teams, it provides a consistent and reliable way to output navigation in templates, reducing overhead and future maintenance. In short, Navigation is a must-have on almost any Craft build because it gives content teams the flexibility they expect from a modern CMS, while keeping everything clean and manageable on the back end.

SEOmatic

plugins.craftcms.com/seomatic

SEOmatic is the go-to SEO plugin for Craft CMS. It’s a ‘turnkey’ solution that gives developers and content teams a powerful set of tools to optimise websites for search without the need to add extra complexity to the mix.

Out of the box, it handles all the essentials: sitemaps, metadata, structured data, and social media previews. All are dynamically generated and easily fine-tuned from the control panel.

If you’ve ever used WordPress, you can think of SEOmatic as Craft’s answer to Yoast — but with less complexity. Yoast can sometimes feel a little bloated and technical. SEOmatic is more tightly integrated into Craft’s architecture, offering the granular control you need without impacting performance.

Imager X

plugins.craftcms.com/imager-x

Imager X is a powerhouse of image handling. It gives developers and content teams full control over how images are resized, cropped, optimised, and delivered across devices.

Instead of manually exporting multiple versions of the same image, Imager X automates the process, generating responsive variants and integrating with image CDNs like Imgix and CloudFront. By automatically serving the right-sized image for each screen, it dramatically improves load times, which is a crucial factor for both user experience and SEO.

In short, Imager X provides a future-proof set of image handling features that ensure users can be confident that their website visuals always look sharp and load fast.

Formie

plugins.craftcms.com/formie

In our humble opinion, Formie is Craft CMS’s most powerful and flexible form builder. It lets you create everything from simple contact forms to complex multi-page applications, all within Craft’s control panel.

Its drag-and-drop interface, custom fields, conditional logic, and built-in spam protection give content teams the freedom to build and manage forms without needing developer input for every small change.

Of course, it’s not the only form builder that can make those claims. For us, what sets Formie apart from the crowd is its seamless integration with Craft CMS and modern marketing workflows.

Formie connects natively to a wide range of third-party services, CRMs, email marketing platforms, Slack, and more, making it easy to integrate with your existing processes and tech stack. It’s a reliable all-in-one solution.

Blitz

plugins.craftcms.com/blitz

Caching is a huge deal when it comes to optimising website speed. Blitz is our first choice for intelligent static page caching on Craft CMS.

Blitz works by serving stored versions of your site’s pages, which dramatically reduces server load and improves page speed. This is an important feature for all websites, especially high-traffic sites or content-heavy builds.

There are alternatives, of course, but Blitz stands out to us and others for being smart about which entries to clear out - and reload - when edits are made. This means content creators needn’t worry about serving stale content to users.

Feed Me

plugins.craftcms.com/feed-me

Feed Me is Craft CMS’s most popular - and best - plugin for importing and syncing content from external sources. And, given it’s from the team behind Craft CMS itself, it should be!

Feed Me supports XML, RSS, ATOM, CSV, and JSON feeds, local and remote, importing your content and mapping it to Entries, Categories, Craft Commerce Products (and variants), and more. For sites that need regular data imports or integrations with third-party systems, it’s an indispensable time-saver.

Ultimately, it’s a feature-rich plugin that supports background processing, duplication handling, Cron, troubleshooting logs, and database backups.

Sprig

plugins.craftcms.com/sprig

Sprig is a little more niche. From the same team as Blitz, it brings reactive, component-based development to Craft CMS without requiring a full JavaScript framework.

It’s a real timesaver that allows developers to create dynamic, AJAX-powered components that update instantly on the page, while still being rendered server-side for performance.

In practice, that means we can bring functionality like live search, adding products to a cart, and form submissions more seamlessly to a website.

Embedded Assets

plugins.craftcms.com/embeddedassets

Embedded Assets is a small but mighty plugin that lets you take content served from YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Twitter (etc…) and use it as a first-class asset within Craft CMS.

This means that embeds behave just like images or files in Craft’s asset manager. In other words, Embedded Assets allows you to manage them as you would manage any other content. This simplified the process for editors and keeps development structured and consistent for developers.

CKEditor

plugins.craftcms.com/ckeditor

According to Pixel & Tonic, CKEditor is ‘the world’s most powerful editor’. And, while we don’t know about that. What we do know is that we use it extensively in our projects to create rich text fields.

It’s a feature-rich plugin that replaces the legendary Redactor plugin. It gives editors and developers the ability to create nested entries within rich text content, manage reusable configs with a drag-and-drop toolbar configurator, link to entries and assets, and apply transforms to selected assets.

The MUD Plugin

This one’s a bit different. This is our very own Craft CMS plugin, available exclusively to MUD clients. And it’s a good one that brings scalable functionality to all the websites we build. Here’s what it currently does…

System reporting | Each night, the site reports its status back to us to show us which version of Craft CMS and plugins are installed and whether there are updates available. This helps us avoid all compatibility and security issues.

Cookie management | This is our own GDPR-compliance cookie banner solution that integrates with Google Tag Manager's consent mode.

A base library for API integrations

Slack notifications of failed queued jobs | So we don’t miss anything!

Short URL and QR code generation for entries

Vimeo API integration | Pulls out video data used in displaying videos in different formats

Performance tools | To optimise the use of Blitz and Sprig in templates

Are these really the best Craft CMS plugins in 2025?

Every web build is different - they vary hugely in scope and complexity of design and function. And that makes it difficult to create a definitive list of the best, most useful plugins Craft CMS has to offer.

As we said earlier, there are over 800 of these things, and the dedication of the Craft CMS community is such that quality and compatibility across the board are incredibly high.

That said, these are the 10 Craft CMS plugins that we return to time and again. As a package, they work together seamlessly and without issue, bringing a lightweight and performant set of functionalities that most projects wouldn’t want to be without.