Why we choose Craft CMS for the best dental websites

When the time comes to create or update your dental website, developers will want to know your preferred content management system. A content management system, or CMS, is the software that makes it possible to add posts, pages and images to your website without touching the code.

The vast majority of web developers will push dental website owners towards a CMS called WordPress. You may know this as a blogging website, but it also powers around 36% of all websites on the internet. Notable websites running on WordPress include BBC America, Microsoft News Centre and Reuters Blog.

While WordPress may have a strong following, we believe there is a better option for your dental website. Craft CMS offers benefits almost identical to WordPress, but with some distinct advantages. To put this in perspective, Craft CMS powers Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix.

In this post, we will explore some of the reasons we choose Craft CMS over WordPress for dental websites.

Themes and plugins

WordPress uses themes for the design and plugins for functionality.

This method allows anyone to create a website without learning a single line of code. While it is possible to get a website up and running without any coding experience, it isn’t always advisable.

WordPress themes make it easy to create a beautiful and functional website, but it doesn’t prioritise unique design. Craft CMS, on the other hand, encourages developers and designers to start from scratch with every website. This reduces the chance of your website looking identical to a competitor site.

Plugins are another common source of conflict for websites. WordPress has a vast library of plugins available, so you can make your website do very complex tasks without writing a single line of code. These plugins are created by third-party developers and not controlled by WordPress. This makes it very easy to install something that could damage your site or leave it vulnerable to hackers. And if WordPress has an update, there is no guarantee that the Plugins you use will also be updated. So your website could lose functionality without warning.

Craft CMS also offers plugins, but these are all created and regulated by Craft. While the plugin market may be smaller, you can move forward with confidence that your website will function correctly. If you are using paid plugins, it’s also a lot easier to keep track of licencing when everything is controlled in the same place. When Craft CMS is updated, the plugins are also updated for added peace of mind.

Website security

When handling patient data, security is of the utmost importance to dental website owners. It is estimated that around 30,000 WordPress websites are hacked per day. A quick search of the common vulnerabilities and exposure list will reveal over 2,700 issues for WordPress and just 30 for Craft.

Hacks can expose sensitive information, change the content of your website, lock you out of your own website and even get your site blacklisted by Google and other search engines. Hacks are more than just an inconvenience, they can severely damage your dental business.

The Craft CMS is incredibly efficient at preventing the most common website hacks. Craft CMS also allows you to create custom user-level permissions. So you can grant access to your site to those who need it without the risk of a person accidentally (or intentionally) damaging the site.

Optimising for search engines

Once you have built your dental website, you will want it to be discoverable. Search engines need to be able to find and understand your website to be able to include it in the search results for potential patients to see. The process of optimising your website is known as search engine optimisation, or SEO, and Craft CMS offers some distinct advantages to help get your site noticed.

WordPress and Craft CMS both offer SEO plugins to help you optimise your site. The vast majority of WordPress users will install a plugin called Yoast to help them optimise pages, blogs and other content. Craft CMS uses a tool called SEOmatic, which is far more powerful and intuitive than Yoast and other WordPress SEO plugins.

Craft CMS also creates a faster and more streamlined web experience, so you can be confident your site will pass all of the relevant Google speed performance tests.

Content management

A successful dental website should be easy to update. Since Craft CMS websites are built from scratch every time, you can take complete control over the type of content you post on your site. This means you can quickly add case studies, blog posts and new service pages with ease.

WordPress was originally developed as a blogging platform, and it shows. If you run your dental website on WordPress, you will have no trouble updating your content. But the most recent WordPress update made changes to the way you add content to your site. And these changes are intended to make it work more like Craft. Instead of a single block of content, you now create smaller blocks of content that can be dragged and dropped as required.

With Craft, your developer will create “design units” with custom labels to make it easier for non-developers to add content. Craft CMS can even detect when you have uploaded an image that is too large and will downsize and compress the image so your website always loads as fast as possible. Craft CMS might take longer to set up, but once the website is live, you’ll have no trouble adding content. It is a very accessible CMS and many of our clients confirm that they find it much less overwhelming than WordPress.

Speed and Performance

As mentioned above in the SEO section, speed is important for SEO. If users have to wait around for your website to load, they will likely go elsewhere. This could send them directly to your competitors. To avoid this fate, we recommend building a fast and efficient website, and we believe that Craft CMS offers the best chance to achieve this.

The best way to build a streamlined and lightning-fast website is to avoid bulky code. As WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform, all WordPress websites are built with certain assumptions in mind. This means all WordPress websites carry a certain amount of code that may well be useless to the functionality of the site.

Craft CMS starts life as an empty container, and the developer is responsible for creating the functionality that is required, and nothing more. And since most functionality is hardcoded into the website, you avoid the need for excess plugins and excess code. If you’re curious about the speed and performance of your current website, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to run tests.

Cost

You could create a WordPress website for free and you would only pay for hosting. On the surface, this would look and feel just like a professional website, but under the surface, limitations in the WordPress platform would sabotage your efforts. With paid templates and plugins, you could improve the experience, but you will still be creating a website in pieces rather than building from the ground up.

Craft CMS has a lifetime licensing fee of $299 (£216 at current exchange rate) and an annual fee of $59 (£43 at current exchange rate). While this might be steeper than WordPress, you can’t really put a price on security, stability and superior SEO. Hosting and development costs can also be more expensive with Craft, but we believe that if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. You can’t gamble with your website performance and hope you come out on top.

Conclusion

For your dental business to be successful, you need a website that is unique, secure and easy to update. Craft CMS simplifies this process to ensure your dental website is always working hard for you. The vast majority of website owners flock to WordPress simply because it is popular, but they fail to consider the extensive flaws in the platform. We recommend Craft CMS for dental websites as it offers complete flexibility to create the online experience your patients deserve.