WordPress powers roughly 43% of all websites on the internet.
That’s an impressive number, but it’s inflated. Abandoned test sites, unconfigured default hosting setups, and blogs that haven’t been updated since 2017 account for millions of them. The active ones? Many of them consist of a patchwork of plugins, each one adding another potential security vulnerability to the pile.
There’s a better solution for enterprises looking to scale securely. In this article, you’ll learn all about Craft CMS, including:
- What is Craft CMS?
- Why WordPress falls short for growing businesses
- What makes Craft CMS different
- Why this matters for home services companies
After 20+ years of building websites for home services companies, we’ve seen the WordPress lifecycle play out hundreds of times. It starts simple, gets bloated, slows down, and eventually becomes a maintenance headache that costs more than it should. That’s why we’ve been paying close attention to Craft CMS.
Key Takeaways
- WordPress’s dominance is showing cracks. Its CMS market share has declined from a peak of about 65% in 2022 to roughly 61% today, and the platform’s growth has effectively stalled.
- Plugin sprawl is a real liability. The vast majority of WordPress security vulnerabilities stem from third-party plugins, not the core software itself.
- Craft CMS is purpose-built for high-performance, custom websites with a clean architecture, a curated plugin ecosystem, and growing adoption among enterprise-level organizations.
- Speed and security directly impact your bottom line. Faster load times improve search rankings, and fewer dependencies mean fewer points of failure for your business.
Ready to Outgrow Your WordPress Site?
If your website feels more like a maintenance project than a marketing asset, it might be time to explore what a purpose-built platform can do for your business. We’d love to show you what’s possible.
What Is Craft CMS?
Craft CMS is a content management system built by Pixel & Tonic. Unlike WordPress, which started as a blogging platform and evolved into a general-purpose CMS, Craft was designed from the ground up to handle complex, custom content. There are no default themes or assumptions about what your site should look like. Every build starts from a clean slate, which gives developers full control over the front-end experience.
Enterprise-level organizations have adopted Craft for specific projects. Netflix uses it for their careers site, and companies like IKEA and the Associated Press chose it for customizability and performance. Craft has been gaining serious traction in this space, and with Craft 6 moving to the Laravel framework later this year, it’s only going to get more capable.
Why WordPress Falls Short for Growing Businesses
We’re not here to bash WordPress. It’s a tool that works well across many use cases. But for businesses that depend on their website to generate leads and revenue, a few recurring issues keep showing up.
- Plugin dependency creates risk. Security researchers have consistently found that most WordPress vulnerabilities originate in third-party plugins and themes, not WordPress itself. When your site needs 20+ plugins just to function the way you want, each one is a potential failure point.
- Performance degrades over time. WordPress doesn’t use a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which means it often loads more code than necessary for any given page request. As you add plugins, themes, and customizations, page speed suffers. Google’s Core Web Vitals directly influence search rankings, so slow pages cost you leads.
- You’re building on someone else’s assumptions. WordPress themes are pre-built structures that your content has to fit into. That’s fine for a basic brochure site. However, when you need a custom content model for your service page that displays localized information, you end up fighting the platform rather than working with it.
What Makes Craft CMS Different
With Craft, you define your content model first and build the front end to match, rather than starting with a template and modifying it. Now, your website reflects your business, not someone else’s idea of what a business site should look like.
The security model is leaner since Craft’s smaller plugin ecosystem is more tightly curated. Developers build custom functionality in code rather than stacking extensions, so there are fewer third-party dependencies to worry about.
Craft’s architecture also only loads what’s needed for each page request, so sites tend to load faster from the start. They don’t rely on workarounds that WordPress typically needs to hit competitive PageSpeed scores.
For home services companies, this speed and functionality bring advantages. Faster load times mean better search rankings. Fewer things break with fewer complex plugins. Custom content architecture means your service pages, city pages, and blog content all work together exactly how they should.
Why This Matters for Home Services Companies
Your website is your most important lead generation tool. When a homeowner searches for AC repair at 2 PM on a 110-degree Phoenix afternoon, they’re ready to buy. Your site needs to load quickly, rank well, and convert visitors into phone calls.
That’s the kind of performance Craft CMS is built for, and what we’re building toward for the companies we work with.
Not Sure Where Your Website Stands?
We’ve spent 20+ years helping home services companies turn their websites into lead-generating machines. Whether you’re curious about Craft CMS or just want an honest assessment of your current site, we’re here to help.
