Craft CMS Developer Benchmark Results 2023
The results are in.
We're so pleased to have been able to conduct the Craft Benchmark survey again. This year we’ve had 282 respondents from 35 countries – responses were down 5% from last year respectively, whilst the number of countries remained the same.
We think that's probably on us for being late to release the survey, with a bit more time we think we could have topped last year. Alas, we'll try again in 2024.
We did this benchmark to:
- Give insight into the Craft CMS developer community
- Give ideas on how to use Craft CMS better
- Give ammunition for pitching Craft CMS to clients
We created this because:
- We're Craft CMS developers
- We believe the report will be helpful for the community
- We wanted to learn and get better at what we do – and hope you do too
And just to clarify – we have no association with Craft CMS or Pixel & Tonic.
Let's go!
Part 1
Who's working with Craft CMS
This section explores who the Craft CMS community is made up of, how they work, and what makes them tick.
What describes you best?
Craft CMS is popular among agencies and freelancers.
What size is your agency?
Craft CMS seems to be the most popular in smaller companies of fewer than 20 employees. Perhaps this is because smaller teams are more able to adopt a less well known platform.
What is your job?
This is a new question for the 2023 benchmark, as we wanted to get to know who’s filling in the survey so that we can have more context about the rest of the answers.
How much of your job is development (coding)?
How many years of professional coding experience do you have?
Craft CMS developers tend to skew towards developers with more experience, rather than those just starting out.
How long have you been using Craft CMS?
Looks like a few more people this year have achieved Brandon Kelly status. 🤔
Are you (or is your business) a Craft CMS Partner?
There’s been a ~8% increase in businesses registering as Craft CMS partners since last year.
40.8%%
Yes
59.2%%
Nope
How important is being a Craft CMS Partner for your business?
At an average rating of 6.3/10, the importance of being a Craft CMS partner is unclear. We also asked what would make being a Craft CMS Partner more useful. The responses broadly fell into the following categories.
Lead Generation
Many respondents mentioned not feeling that being a Craft CMS partner was creating many leads for their business, with some also noting the lack of prominence and visibility through on the partners directory.
It was also noted several times that being a partner lacks any analytics such as profile views and conversions, so it’s difficult to know whether being a partner is creating any value.
Communication and networking
Partners want more direct communication from Pixel & Tonic and involvement in the development of new Craft CMS and marketing features.
Many indicated a request for newsletters with roadmap updates, partner events, and more networking evenings.
Discounts and Incentives
A lot of responses suggested that being a Partner would be more obviously beneficial if they received discounts on various items such as DotAll tickets, license fees, and Craft Cloud hosting.
Quality Assurance and Services Definition
It was noted by a few respondents that being a partner would feel more meaningful if there were some sort of quality assurance.
Many also noted that a dedicated space to define a business’ services would be good.
In the last 12 months, how many new Craft CMS projects have you worked on in total?
What percentage of your new projects were built with Craft CMS?
Great to see that nearly 60% of respondents' sites were almost or were exclusively built with Craft CMS.
In the last 12 months, what types of websites have you built with Craft CMS?
As well as the main categories above, Craft CMS has been used for a huge variety of projects this year, including:
Government sites
Non-profit sites
Educational websites
Online magazines
SaaS platforms
Charity and fundraising sites
Real Estate websites
Intranets
In the last 12 months, what other CMSs have you developed with?
Surprise suprise, WordPress takes pole position, whereas no-code website builders have also proved popular. Webflow takes 3rd place with 14.7% of respondents having used it, along with Squarespace at 12.5%.
ExpressionEngine suffered a blow, being knocked down from 2nd place to 4th.
49.5%%
Wordpress
29.3%%
Shopify
14.7%
Webflow
12.5%%
ExpressionEngine
12.5%%
Squarespace
12%%
Statamic
8.2%%
Kirby
6%%
Strapi
What CMS is your agency / company / personal website built on?
Similar results to last year’s survey, but in a surprising twist we’ve got more personal websites being built in Expression Engine.
67.4%%
Craft CMS... duh!
15.2%%
No CMS
4.3%%
WordPress
4%%
ExpressionEngine
What kind of projects would you not consider using Craft CMS for?
This one was super interesting to read about. Here are the main thoughts our respondents gave for not using Craft CMS.
⚙️ Very technical projects
Projects requiring substantial backend customisation or large-scale data operations might benefit from dedicated frameworks.
🛍 Complex ecommerce projects
While Craft Commerce exists, some prefer specialised platforms like Shopify for robust features and cost-effectiveness.
🙃 Headless projects
While Craft offers headless capabilities, other solutions like Contentful might be more dedicated and efficient for purely data delivery.
🙂 Simple projects
For simple, static sites, building with HTML/CSS or tools like Astro might be easier and lighter.
💸 Budget projects
Very small projects with minimal content or updates might not justify the CMS overhead and licensing cost.
In the last 12 months, what versions of Craft CMS have you worked with?
In the last 12 months, have you upgraded a Craft CMS 2 site to Craft CMS 3 or 4?
How smoothly did it go?
There were mixed feelings on how easy it is to upgrade a Craft 2 site. This is understandable since Craft 3 was a huge shift to composer.
We asked how this process could have been better - here are the main thoughts:
Better documentation
More detailed instructions, compatibility information, and upgrade path guidance, especially for major version jumps.
Specialised upgrade tools
Consider features like single-click upgrades, automated plugin updates, and deprecation code detection.
Plugin compatibility
Address legacy plugins or offer migration assistance for discontinued ones.
Composer errors
Improve error messages to be more user-friendly and actionable.
In the last 12 months, have you upgraded a Craft CMS 3 site to Craft CMS 4?
How smoothly did it go?
Developers had a much better time upgrading from Craft 3 to Craft 4.
Here are the main suggestions to improve this going forward.
Plugin compatibility
Lack of upgrade paths for some plugins caused downtime and rework.
Documentation
More detailed information on breaking changes, plugins, and migrations.
Migrations
Some complexities and unexpected issues during data migration.
User-friendliness
Simplify composer.json updates, upgrade process steps, and error messages.
Specific elements
Address revamp in Commerce and potential pitfalls with custom modules.
Automation
More automation (e.g., single-click upgrades, automatic code checks).
Deprecation warnings
Better deprecation warnings and early adoption opportunities.
Plugin support
Improved plugin support and communication from developers.
Part 2
Technology
This section explores the various ways developers use Craft CMS, covering how they kick off a new project, technology they use, and various other decisions.
Which operating system do you do your Craft CMS development on?
Like last year, most developers use an Apple Mac.
87.5%%
Mac
12.5%%
Windows
8.5%%
Linux
0.7%%
Other
WSL69.8%%
Chrome
37.4%%
Firefox
21.7%%
Safari
8.5%%
Brave
5.3%%
Edge
1.4%%
Opera
0.7%%
Vivaldi
7.8%%
Other
59.3%%
Visual Studio Code
42.1%%
PHPStorm
9.6%%
Sublime Text
7.5%%
Nova
What are your top 3 VS Code extension recommendations?
We thought VS Code would be a popular choice, so we also asked respondents to list their favourite VS Code extensions. Here are the most popular:
Twig Language 2
(syntax highlighting, formatting, IntelliSense for Twig templates)
Tailwind CSS IntelliSense
(autocomplete, linting, class definitions for Tailwind CSS)
PHP Intelephense
(advanced PHP language support, IntelliSense, code completion)
GitLens
(enhanced Git integration within VS Code)
Twig Language 2
Tailwind CSS IntelliSense
PHP Intelephense
What local environment software do you use for developing Craft CMS projects?
DDEV is now well established as a top choice at almost 65% of the vote.
We’ve still got 3% of users on Nitro, down from 15% last year.
64.6%
DDEV
25%
Docker
16.4%
MAMP / WAMP / XAMP
What local environment tool do you use for working with databases on Craft CMS projects?
Sequel Pro has fallen down a place since last year, the third spot now being taken by PHPMyAdmin.
36.6%%
TablePlus
33.3%%
Sequel Ace
19.2%%
PHPMyAdmin
When starting a project how do you download Craft CMS?
86.4% start their build process with Composer. Many of the custom answers mentioned a boilerplate repo, which may well also use Composer too.
💡 Craft Tip
It's down 3% from last year, but there's still 4% of respondents get started on Craft CMS projects by manually downloading it.
Check out the helpful docs on the Craft CMS site for using the Composer method.
Do you use a Craft CMS 'boilerplate' for starting new projects?
Of the ~15% of developers who use a public boilerplate repo, here are the most popular:
CraftQuest craft-4-starter (3 mentions)
statikbe/craft (2 mentions)
Craft on DDEV by kerns
What database do you use for Craft CMS projects?
No change here from last year - PostgreSQL adoption has been slow.
83.6%%
MySQL
45%%
MariaDB
9.6%%
PostgreSQL
Where do you define custom routes?
Where do you define image transforms?
How do you optimise and compress your images?
What plugin do you use for image optimisation and compression?
The two titans of image transformation are Imager X (44 mentions) and ImageOptimize (22 mentions), with almost no other plugins being mentioned.
These were also the most popular plugins mentioned for image optimisation and compression.
Imager X
ImageOptimize
Image Resizer
How do you optimise and compress your images?
What service do you use for image optimisation and compression?
Imgix is a very popular service among Craft CMS developers. Second in line is Servd’s image optimisation service. The other tools mentioned were manual tools such as TinyPng and ImageOptim.
Do you implement Eager-Loading in your templates?
Around 84% of developers are implementing full or partial eager loading in their templates. With 4% of respondents not knowing what it is.
We recommend you check out the docs - eager loading is a great way to make your database queries more efficient and speed up your website.
How do you structure your Section Types (Singles, Channels and Structures)?
What forms of caching do you use to improve the performance of the Craft CMS sites you build?
There are lots of different tools we can use to improve the performance of our sites, usually by reducing PHP and database work, ranging form native Craft tools, to plugins, to server-level enhancements.
Popular responses from the ‘other’ option include: Servd static caching, Litespeed cache, Next.js Incremental Static Regeneration and Server-level caching.
What libraries or frameworks do you use to add reactivity to the sites you build?
51.8%%
Sprig
43.8%%
Alpine.js
38%%
Vue.js
14.5%%
htmx
How do you update Craft CMS?
Do you use Craft CMS's Project Config?
Almost 95% of respondents use the project configuration either all the time or most of the time. That’s up by 5% from the 2022 survey.
We think it’s one of Craft’s best-selling points and couldn’t imagine #devlife without it.
Of the people who don’t use it, we’d love to know why. Maybe we’ll put that in the questionnaire next year.
Do you (usually) allow config admin changes on production
The Project Config works best when clients can’t make changes on production, so it makes sense that there’s a strong correlation here about permissions. There’s a slight increase in Nos since last year, up by around 5% - which is the same as the increase about using Project Config in general.
In 2023, what Javascript Libraries/Frameworks/Tools have you typically use with Craft CMS?
jQuery is slightly less popular than our 2022 survey, but all the top spots remain the same.
Nuxt.js was the most popular “other” mention, so we’ll be sure to include that in the options next year.
React has fallen to 6th place, from 2021’s 4th.
Backbone and Ember got 0 votes.
52.3%%
None – Vanilla, baby
40.4%%
Alpine
37.9%%
Vue.js
23.8%%
jQuery
In 2023, what CSS frameworks have you typically use with Craft CMS?
Tailwind still has a very strong lead, with “roll your own” dropping down from around ~40% to ~23%.
At Honcho we love Tailwind and can’t imagine life without it.
67.3%%
Tailwind
32%%
SCSS
22.9%%
None – I roll my own
18.5%%
Bootstrap
How do you handle SEO functionality on your Craft CMS sites?
SEOmatic is clearly the most popular SEO plugin, followed by ~18% of developers who roll their own solution.
We asked respondents who roll their own solution to elaborate, and the custom solutions fall into two categories - custom fields in the CMS, and hardcoding metadata within the templates.
Have you ever used Craft CMS as a headless CMS?
Part 3
Client and authorship experience
This section covers how developers work with the clients, in terms of creating the best experience for them.
Do you give your clients' full Admin accounts?
Most people here opt for never or occasionally, clearly erring on the side of caution.
Do you customise the Entry column views in the Craft CMS Admin?
Craft CMS allows you to customise which columns are displayed in which entry sections in the CMS, to only show the relevant data to your clients.
We love this feature and apparently so do most respondents.
91.4%%
Yes
7.5%
No