A great year of Craft 3

12 months to date we released our website, rebuilt in Craft 3.

Since then we've built, and maintained a bunch of our clients' websites. We've seen a 208% increase in page views this year, let's find out why.

With the performance of Craft, and a little help from our favourite plugin SEOmatic, we've been able to double our web traffic compared to last year. All of our metrics have seen significant improvement, and this is echoed with our clients' analytics.

Web Stats

As you can see from our analytical data, users browsing our site has almost doubled this year. Page views have increased by 208%. We love this stat because it signifies a huge increase in engagement with our content.

One of the reasons we've found traffic increasing so significantly is the influx of fresh content from our team. We enjoy writing blog posts because editing in Craft is so fluid that anyone can do it, we're breaking down barriers between technical ability and the web.

We like Craft for its intuitive CMS UX. A good design explains itself and the flexibility that Craft offers us as developers, allows us to build content fields that just make sense to everybody. This means our client's can efficiently create and edit their content independently. Craft's robust matrix system allows anybody to build their pages out with custom built components.

Style Guide

Our clients love Craft as much as we do. We split our web designs into blocks of content called Components. We then make use of Craft's matrix functionality to allow components to be re-used, meaning our clients never have that boring templated feel to their websites.

If you take a look at any of our clients' websites, it will be very clear that they have developed their content over time independently. People just seem to get Craft. It's so obvious how to build new pages, edit copy, swap out imagery.

Here's a few of our favourite Craft 3 projects over the year:

FortuneFish

A bigger fish.

Tully

Stress-free onboarding.

British Gas Lite

Igniting an online presence.

What we'd like to see in Craft 4

Over the year we've come across a few tweaks we'd like to see Pixel & Tonic (Craft devs) make in Craft 4.

Firstly, one-click updates in the CMS available to non-technical users are a potential pitfall. If an admin forgets updates and have them queue up over a long time, updating them all in bulk can cause errors if the server runs out of memory.

In the early days of Craft 3 the plugin market was underwhelming. Take forms for example, last year there were only 2 robust and feature-rich plugins available - FormBuilder and FreeForm. This caused the few good plugins to be priced quite steeply. Fortunately, of late we've seen this improve, as naturally Craft 3 grows in popularity and developers start releasing their plugins on the latest version. We're hoping Craft 3 plugins will be easily portable to 4.


Official Craft Partner

We decided we were so confident with Craft that we reached out to Pixel & Tonic to become approved Craft Partners. We're now verified by the team behind our favourite CMS. Here's our profile!

In conclusion, we're pretty close to our expectations of Craft 3 as written last year here. It's an insanely powerful CMS, complimented with a beautiful UI and robust system architecture. We'll continue to build websites with it and return next year for another update!