Why Craft CMS Suits Many Small Sites
August 23, 2021
A brief, high-level overview of what Craft CMS does well and why it suits many small sites better than similar PHP content management systems.
WordPress and Drupal are excellent at what they do, but neither is always the right fit for a hand-built, high-performance small site.
Drupal is spectacular when it comes to managing thousands upon thousands of assets and users. Its permissions are incredibly fine-grained — if a site needs to display a subset of tens of thousands of nodes based on a user's location, Drupal can be a suitable tool. But that requirement rarely comes up, and for most sites Drupal is overkill. The learning curve can be rough, and major updates have a habit of breaking things.
WordPress, on the other hand, is truly best-in-class blog software, and there is a very good reason it powers such a large share of the web. The interface is remarkably intuitive, and any competent developer can get a fully featured blog up and running in a matter of hours. The trouble is that WordPress on its own often is not enough — not without a slew of plugins to extend it beyond its core. Those plugins add expense and complexity while, too often, reducing security.
A Better Balance
When a PHP content management system is needed, Craft CMS is a strong choice. Craft strikes a near-perfect balance: it gives developers complete control on both the front and back ends while still providing a comprehensive set of tools out of the box.
So What's Different About Craft?
Craft gives developers flexibility without imposing a predefined design. A default installation of Craft ships with no predefined HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fields or content types. That sounds spartan, but it is exactly the point — it is a blank slate that lets developers implement any framework or design without fighting the system's assumptions.
Under the hood, Craft uses the Twig templating engine on top of the Yii PHP framework. Both are solid, mature, secure and well documented. That foundation helps ensure longevity while avoiding technical debt and the breaking changes that come with every major update elsewhere. Where one platform breaks everything with each release and another breaks nothing while quietly piling up legacy code, Craft manages to stay both stable and modern.
Support Has a Schedule
Craft's published support policy gives each major version at least two years of active support, followed by another year of critical security fixes where possible. Its version table lists April 30, 2026 as the end of security support for Craft CMS 4. Craft CMS 5 has active support through December 31, 2030 and security support through December 31, 2031. For a site still using Craft 4, that makes planning a move to a supported version a maintenance consideration alongside content and design.
The Bottom Line
No single tool is right for every job, and other platforms may fit particular needs. For many bespoke, maintainable, high-performance small sites, Craft is a strong option. The web development guide explains what to look for in a maintainable site.