Why use Craft CMS instead of WordPress?

Both are good tools. WordPress runs a large share of the web for good reasons — it's free, familiar, has a plugin for almost anything, and plenty of excellent sites are built on it. It can do almost any job you'd ask a CMS to do.

We've chosen Craft CMS for our own work for over a decade. This post explains why Craft has been the more comfortable home for the sites we build.

Pixel & Tonic maintain their own Craft CMS vs WordPress page with supporting material and links to other agencies' takes. Worth a read alongside this one.

Bespoke builds, not themed sites

WordPress has a theming layer. Most sites start from a theme and customise from there. That's efficient if the theme is close to what you need. When it isn't, a lot of time goes into overriding markup and working around assumptions the theme has made.

Craft has no theming layer. Every site is built from the ground up in Twig, with the HTML you actually want and nothing you don't. The name fits: Craft sites are crafted, not assembled from a theme. That matches how we like to work — fewer surprises when a design calls for something unusual, and cleaner output for performance, SEO, and accessibility.

Content modelling

Every project starts with a content model. Sections, entry types, fields, relations, matrix blocks — in Craft these are part of the core, and they work together predictably. When we sit down with a client to map out a staff directory, a case study library, or a multi-language product catalogue, Craft lets us describe the shape of the content directly.

WordPress can model the same things, usually with Advanced Custom Fields and Custom Post Types UI alongside the core. That combination works well, and many teams are happy with it. For us, having structured content in the core rather than assembled from extensions makes long-term maintenance simpler — one system to reason about, one set of docs, one upgrade path.

One practical knock-on: because the content model is defined up front, editors can start populating a site in the control panel while design and front-end work are still in flight. That parallelism is useful on bigger projects.

The editor experience

Content editors use the CMS every day. Craft's control panel is the best of any CMS we've used: live preview that works across every field (including private preview URLs for stakeholders), drafts and scheduled publishing, a full revision history showing who changed what and when, multiple editors working on the same entry without overwriting each other, and granular permissions per field and per section.

Gutenberg has improved a lot, and editors who've grown up with WordPress are often very fluent in it. When we've moved clients from WordPress to Craft, the feedback we usually hear is that the control panel feels less busy and more predictable.

Accessibility

Accessibility is where Craft's lead is most material for our clients. The Craft control panel is audited against WCAG 2.2 and ATAG 2.0 — the standard that applies to authoring tools themselves, not just the sites they produce. That means the CMS an editor uses is accessible, which matters if your organisation has disabled staff creating content, or is subject to the UK Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations.

Craft's control panel also ships with an accessibility mode, keyboard-navigable interfaces throughout, and target sizes that meet WCAG 2.1 AAA — stronger than the AA baseline most sites aim for. The W3C itself chose Craft over WordPress for the new W3C.org, specifically on accessibility grounds.

WordPress sites can absolutely be made accessible at the front end — we've seen plenty that are. The difference is that Craft gets you closer to an accessible result by default, and the authoring experience itself doesn't push editors toward inaccessible output.

Security

Every CMS needs patching, and every CMS has had its incidents, Craft included. The difference is in the attack surface.

WordPress's scale means it's the most probed CMS on the web, and a lot of the risk sits in the plugin ecosystem. Public CVE figures illustrate the gap: Craft's own comparison page cites 1,412 WordPress CVEs against six for Craft. That's partly because Craft has far fewer installs and far fewer plugins, but it's also a function of how the two ecosystems are shaped — Craft's plugin store is smaller and more closely tied to Pixel & Tonic, updates are managed through the industry-standard Composer package manager, and the Pixel & Tonic team ship patches quickly.

Supply-chain incidents on the WordPress side are worth taking seriously too. Anchor.host documented a case where an attacker bought up around 30 abandoned WordPress plugins and planted a backdoor in every one of them — the kind of risk that's hard to defend against when a site depends on a long tail of third-party plugins from independent authors. Craft could in principle suffer the same thing, but Craft sites rely on plugins less heavily for basic functionality, and the ecosystem is much smaller — so the odds of picking up a compromised plugin in the first place are far lower.

With good hosting, disciplined plugin choices, and a managed WAF, WordPress can be run securely, and many teams do exactly that. For us, Craft means less ongoing hardening work per site. Over 100 Craft builds in, the incidents we've seen have been rare and contained — fewer than we hear about from clients' past experience and from other agencies on the WordPress side.

Performance

Both platforms can be fast. The difference is how much tuning it takes to get there.

A default Craft install is quick out of the box — Twig templating, a sensible query builder, built-in template and element caching, and no default markup weighing pages down. A well-tuned WordPress install can match or beat it, but getting there usually means a caching plugin, object cache, CDN configuration, and careful plugin hygiene. Neither approach is wrong; Craft's default just leaves us with less to manage.

Craft scales too. Our build for Transparency International handles around 3 million annual visitors and peaked at over 500,000 pageviews in 24 hours during the Corruption Perceptions Index launch. It hasn't been the CMS that's groaned under load.

SEO

WordPress has Yoast. Craft has SEOmatic, which in our view is the better tool — more granular control of meta, structured data, sitemaps, and redirects, with cleaner integration into the content model. Moz uses SEOmatic on their own site, which is a reasonable vote of confidence from a company that sells SEO software for a living.

Clean markup helps too. Because Craft renders only the HTML you've written, pages tend to be lean by default.

Multisite and multi-language

A lot of our clients operate across brands, regions, or languages. Transport & Environment runs seven European offices from a single Craft install. iMusician publishes in six languages. MEDITE SMARTPLY runs in English, French, Dutch and German. Careys is a dual-brand Craft multisite. Scientifica runs in English and Chinese.

All of this is core Craft functionality. Content can be shared or localised per site, editors work in their own language, and everything upgrades as one. WordPress can do multisite and multi-language, but it typically leans on plugins (WPML, Polylang, MultilingualPress) and careful configuration. For organisations with serious localisation requirements, Craft's built-in approach saves real configuration work.

Headless, hybrid, and APIs

Craft ships with a native GraphQL API and a full Element API for REST. Headless builds, hybrid architectures (Craft for content, a decoupled front end for delivery), and mobile app backends are supported directly rather than bolted on. We've delivered all three.

WordPress has a REST API and WPGraphQL as a plugin, and both work. Craft's APIs feel more like part of the product than an add-on, and map directly onto the same content model editors are working in.

Total cost of ownership

Craft has a licence fee. WordPress doesn't. Over a five-year horizon the picture evens out.

WordPress plugins often carry annual licences — ACF Pro, Yoast, WP Rocket, Gravity Forms, a security plugin, a backup plugin — which add up. Craft's licensing is a one-off core fee and per-plugin licences for what you actually use. The totals can end up similar; it depends entirely on the stack you choose. The real savings, for us, come from spending less time maintaining and debugging rather than from the licence column.

Craft 6 and the move to Laravel

Going into our next decade as an agency, one more reason we're backing Craft: Craft 6 is moving to Laravel.

Craft has been built on Yii since day one. Yii is a capable framework, but its surrounding community is small. Laravel is one of the most widely used PHP frameworks today, with a large package ecosystem and a large pool of developers who know it well.

For clients, the upgrade path stays the same. Existing Craft 5 sites will move to Craft 6 the way they've always moved between major versions. What changes is what we can build on top.

For developers, Craft projects will gain access to the rest of the Laravel ecosystem directly. Horizon for queue monitoring. Octane for faster request handling. Livewire for interactive admin interfaces. Sanctum for API auth. Any well-maintained package on Packagist, usable in a Craft project without adapter code.

It also means clients can pick from a larger hiring pool if they ever want to bring work in-house, and we can hire from it too. Queue-heavy integrations, real-time features, and ambitious custom modules get quicker to build.

When WordPress is the right call

Plenty of situations point to WordPress. A small blog, a local business site, a simple shop, a project where the team is already fluent in WordPress, or anything leaning heavily on WooCommerce. In those cases WordPress is often the easiest way to get a good outcome, and we'd say so.

When Craft is the right call

For the sites we build — universities, charities, publishers, construction firms, international NGOs — Craft has held up well: a predictable content model, an editor UI that scales, accessibility at the authoring layer, and a smaller maintenance burden over time. It's why we're an Enterprise Verified Craft Partner, and why every developer on our team works with Craft every day.

Thinking about a move?

We migrate sites from WordPress to Craft regularly. The content comes across, the URLs are preserved, and the editors tend to settle in within a week or two.