Craft CMS vs WordPress – Why Craft Handles SEO Better than WordPress
Choosing the right Content Management System (CMS) is essential when starting a blog. Without the right CMS, you'll end up experiencing many issues. These issues may include: problematic load times, limited functionality, poor support, and more. Worse, you most likely couldn't write blog posts effectively. There are some nearly free options for developing your website in the market. These options include: Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and WordPress. However, there is a better alternative when it comes to choosing the best CMS for SEO.
Fortunately, Craft CMS is here.
In this article, we'll talk about Craft CMS, a WordPress alternative. Craft CMS is an excellent blogging platform that can help rank online easier. Craft CMS comes with different pricing tiers, with one option being completely free. Unlike WordPress, Craft CMS is not open source. With Craft CMS, and some time investment, we can help you create a superb blogging experience. One that will help you rank in search engines and appear well in social media.
1. Craft CMS Overview
Craft CMS is a powerful and flexible content management system. It is used for creating and managing content on your website. With different plugins available, Craft CMS allows developers to expand on functionality. Craft CMS is built on top of the Yii 2 framework that allows for easy integration with other platforms. Craft CMS' documentation, Discord community, as well as Craft Quest provides extensive support.
To effectively use Craft CMS as a web developer, you first need to install it on your own server. You can use an HTML template you can get on Theme Forest, but you still need to write your own Twig code. This is so you can fetch the contents from the database and display it on the front-end.
Craft CMS offers a beautiful and intuitive editing experience for the client. This makes it a great alternative to WordPress, but does require technical expertise.
2. Craft CMS Simple Interface
The Craft CMS administrative panel is simple, clean, and easy-to-use. Everything goes according to your specific content requirements, with pages and entry types separated. It's fully responsive, too. No matter what device you're on, you can use it with a web browser to edit content and your blog posts as many times as you want.
For bloggers, having a straightforward interface is a significant benefit for creating blog posts. It motivates them to focus solely on creating content and putting it out there. The simplicity of the Craft CMS interface extends into the realm of e-commerce as well. Craft Commerce, a first party e-commerce extension for Craft CMS by Pixel and Tonic continue to implement and create: simplicity, power, and sophistication at every turn.
Streamlined Content Management Experience
One of the biggest advantages of using Craft CMS over WordPress is its streamlined and intuitive interface. WordPress relies heavily on third-party plugins to provide basic content management functionality. On the flip side, Craft CMS has built-in features, that make it easy to create and publish content with ease. Craft CMS has fields that can allow the editing experience to manage all the content of your website. WordPress is limited in this way. Unless you use some external plugins such as advanced custom fields or custom post types.
Ease of Use
Finally, one major advantage of using Craft CMS over WordPress is its ease of use. The platform was designed from the ground up with usability in mind. This makes it simple for users at all skill levels to navigate and manage their website's content.
3. Craft CMS SEO Advantages
Craft CMS performs very well in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With white hat SEO tactics, Craft CMS will get you on the good side of search engines. Within the Craft Plugin Store, you can get the SEOmatic plugin, which is the number one SEO plugin for Craft CMS. It is similar to Yoast SEO for WordPress, except it performs better. SEOmatic facilitates the application of modern SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices. This plugin is used by the creators of Craft CMS Pixel and Tonic and even the SEO experts at Moz. Craft CMS with SEOmatic is an option worth considering over a WordPress website.
The Importance of SEO in Craft CMS: Boosting Your Website's Visibility
Craft CMS has a noticeable load speed improvement over WordPress. This is due to the fact that usually there is a lot less bloat in the code within Craft CMS. The CMS also offers SEO technical features to improve your website's visibility. This includes setting your own slugs for each page. You can also set the exact website structure for your visitor to navigate your site with. If you get the SEOmatic plugin, you can also add Schema markup within the website quite easily. SEOmatic offers a sitemap so you can index you website. With the plugin, you can also add custom titles and meta descriptions for each page. You can edit the robots.txt file directly. You can also add canonicalization and other advanced SEO features. Craft offers good technical implementation of modern SEO practices. Whether you stick with WordPress or move towards Craft CMS. Either way, implementing these SEO strategies are essential for your online business.
Performance Improvements
Craft CMS offers various performance improvements that can help boost your website's SEO. One of the most important factors in SEO is page load times. Slow loading pages frustrate users and have a negative effect your search rankings. Craft CMS has several features to ensure fast page load times. These include, caching, image size optimization, and lazy loading images. These features help reduce the size of images and web pages which helps your SEO efforts.
WordPress does offer image size optimization. However, it is limited to a pre-selection of sizes, which you can modify with some code. Craft CMS on the other hand, allows you to set an unlimited amount of custom image sizes. Upload one image and have it scale automatically based on what size you need to display it as. The uploaded image will adjust the size for each copy of that image. Each copy will have an adjusted size that can be viewed within a particular section of the site. This effect will have a dramatic increase in page load times, which in turn improves your SEO.
Another essential factor in SEO is mobile responsiveness. Half of the internet traffic coming from mobile devices. Having a mobile-friendly website is critical. When building a Craft CMS website, you can design the website to be mobile responsive. You can do the same with WordPress.
Craft CMS SEO Tools
Craft CMS also provides SEO tools that can help you optimize your website for search engines. One of these tools is customizable meta titles and descriptions. Meta titles and descriptions are HTML elements that provide information about the content on a web page to search engines. You can customize these elements with relevant keywords and compelling descriptions. This will increase the chances of your web pages appearing higher in search results. WordPress offers the same thing with Yoast SEO.
Another helpful tool provided by Craft CMS is sitemaps. A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the pages on your website. It helps search engines crawl web pages more efficiently. By submitting a sitemap to search engines like Google or Bing, you can ensure all your web pages will be indexed properly.
Lastly, Craft CMS provides canonical URLs, which is a feature missing in WordPress.
A canonical URL is the preferred version of a web page that you want search engines to index. By specifying a canonical URL, you can avoid duplicate content issues. This will help resolve an issue that would otherwise have a negative effect on your SEO. Additionally, Craft CMS has a cache mechanism that helps to optimize website performance.
4. Flexibility
Craft CMS also gives you better control over your blog's content. It doesn't set rules when creating content or using templates. You're the user, so you're free to whip up content according to a preferred digital strategy.
Because the content management system separates the templates from the data, you're free to implement unique designs. It doesn't hold restrictions over certain types of content or functions.
5. Localization
The localization feature of Craft CMS also makes it a top-notch content management system. It allows a website to adapt to the language used by specific users in a location. Notably, it translates your blog's content so your target audience can understand your message better. It can translate your content into 18 languages. It also supports 100+ content locations.
The localization feature of Craft CMS also makes it a top-notch content management system.
6. Craft CMS vs WordPress: Website Security Comparison
Craft CMS and WordPress are two of the most popular content management systems (CMS) available for website development. While both platforms offer a range of features and benefits, one area where they differ significantly is website security. In this section, we will compare the security features of Craft CMS and WordPress.
Built-in Security Features
Craft CMS has a reputation for being more secure than WordPress due to its built-in security features. WordPress, relies heavily on third-party plugins for security. Examples include the iThemes Security plugin and Wordfence. Craft CMS comes with built-in security features that help protect websites from hacking attacks. Craft CMS includes CSRF protection, XSS filtering, and strict password policies to prevent unauthorized access to websites.
Plugin Approval Process
Another way in which Craft CMS ensures website security is through its strict plugin approval process. All plugins submitted to the official Craft Plugin Store must first be approved. Craft's team of developers undergo a rigorous review process before a plugin is made available for use. This ensures that only secure and reliable plugins are available for use on websites developed using Craft CMS. Unlike WordPress, which has had security issues in the past.
WordPress Vulnerabilities
WordPress remains the most popular content management systems in use today. However, it is also more vulnerable to hacking attacks due to its popularity and the number of plugins available. Hackers often target WordPress sites because they know that many users fail to update their sites regularly. WordPress users may also install outdated or insecure plugins.
7. Built-In Support and Craft Quest
Craft CMS's built-in support system is also one of its best features. If you're experiencing technical glitches, you can directly send a message to its support system from the administrative dashboard. And if you need a walkthrough on how to maximize the use of the CMS, Craft CMS's official training partner, Craft Quest, won't disappoint you. Craft Quest features unlimited access to training videos, complete courses, concise lessons, and recorded live streams. You can use it as an educational resource.
Topics include using the Tree command, setting up an existing site in Nitro 2, setting up Mailhog in Nitro 2 for local email, and more. Basically, Craft Quest will teach you everything you need to know about building your first blog or website using Craft CMS.
Single author and a blogger who wants to explore what Craft CMS offers? You'll get by without problems using its free version. After all, its core features should be enough. Suppose you're a group of authors, seasoned bloggers, or website owners. In that case, you may want to use add-ons to complement its core functionality. And if so, that's when you upgrade to its pro version.
8. Why Choose Craft CMS for Your Website
Craft CMS is a powerful and flexible content management system that offers numerous benefits for website owners. With its robust features and user-friendly interface, it has become a great choice among developers and website owners. While WordPress remains a widely-used option, Craft CMS stands out with its unique advantages.
Craft CMS provides an excellent platform for search engine optimization (SEO). This allows you to boost your website's visibility in search results. Its structure makes it easy to optimize your content for keywords and meta tags. One of the main advantages of Craft CMS over WordPress is its superior customization options. With Craft CMS, you have complete control over every aspect of your website's design and functionality. This allows you to create a truly unique online presence.
Craft CMS offers a more streamlined and intuitive editing experience than WordPress.
In terms of security, Craft CMS is also a top performer compared to WordPress. Its built-in security features help protect your site from hacking attempts and malicious scripts. Craft CMS gives you the peace of mind knowing that your valuable data is safe.
Conclusion
Implementing strong technical SEO strategies are essential for growing your online business. This is true regardless whether you end up using WordPress or Craft CMS. With that said, through our experience working with both platforms; we believe Craft CMS offers more modern SEO practices that make a site easier to rank. We find that it is easier to get a website to rank well with Craft CMS as opposed to getting a website to rank well with WordPress. Both CMS' offer their own unique solutions for certain situations. Both offer their unique benefits and are valuable for specific use cases.
