Our Top 5 Craft CMS Plugins

Building a website on Craft CMS is an exercise in flexibility and precision. Unlike other platforms, Craft gives developers a blank canvas, which means the power of the site often comes down to the plugins you choose.

We’ve developed a "go-to" toolkit - a handful of essential plugins that we install on nearly every new Craft CMS build. These tools drastically cut down development time, enhance content editor experience, and ensure the resulting websites are fast, flexible, and perfectly optimised.

1. CKEditor: The Future of Rich Text Editing

Every content manager needs a reliable, feature-rich text editor, and CKEditor is now the clear choice for Craft CMS. As the officially supported Rich Text Editor plugin, it provides a powerful and extensible way to manage long-form content.

Why we love it:

Modern Interface: Powered by CKEditor 5, it offers a clean, intuitive WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) experience that dramatically improves content workflow.

Deep Craft Integration: It allows editors to easily link to existing Entries, Assets, and other Craft elements, and even insert nested entries for dynamic, modular long-form content.

Reusable Configs: Developers can create custom, reusable toolbar configurations with a drag-and-drop tool, giving content editors exactly the options they need (and nothing they don't).

CKEditor is the essential foundation for a superior content authoring experience.

2. Formie: The Ultimate Form Builder

Every website needs forms, but we don't settle for basic contact fields. Formie is, hands down, the most user-friendly and feature-rich form builder available for Craft.

Why we love it:

Drag-and-Drop Interface: Content editors can build complex forms without needing a developer, complete with multi-page flows and conditional logic.

Developer-Friendly: For us, it offers robust hooks and integrations, allowing us to connect forms seamlessly to third-party services like Mailchimp or CRMs.

Security Built-in: It handles spam prevention (Honeypot, reCAPTCHA) and submission security out of the box, keeping your data safe.

Simply put, Formie transforms form management from a development task into an editorial one.

3. Imager X: Image Optimisation, Simplified

In a performance-obsessed world, poor image handling is a non-starter. Imager X is a technical powerhouse that automates the entire process of generating and serving responsive, optimised images.

Why we love it:

Responsive Images: Automatically generates multiple, correctly sized image variants and serves the perfect one for every screen size and device.

Next-Gen Formats: Effortlessly converts images to modern, high-efficiency formats like WebP to dramatically reduce file sizes and improve page load speed.

Integrated CDNs: Supports image CDNs like Imgix, Cloudflare Images, and CloudFront, offloading image transformation from your web server for superior performance and scalability.

Imager X is the single best way to ensure your website is fast without sacrificing visual quality.

4. SEOmatic: Comprehensive Technical SEO

In the world of Craft, SEOmatic is the established champion for search engine optimisation. It’s a "set it and forget it" tool for technical SEO that gives content editors all the control they need.

Why we love it:

Turnkey Solution: Handles all the meta tags, sitemaps, and basic configuration needed for great SEO, all from a central, easy-to-use control panel.

Structured Data (JSON-LD): Automatically generates the complex structured data that search engines love, giving your content the best chance to appear in rich results.

Social Previews: Provides live previews for how content will look when shared on X (Twitter), Facebook, and other social platforms, ensuring perfect presentation every time.

SEOmatic is the essential plugin for an SEO-first website build.

5. Retour: Effortless Redirect Management

Migrating an old site or restructuring a new one means dealing with 301 redirects—a critical step for maintaining SEO value and a good user experience. Retour makes this process incredibly simple for both developers and content managers.

Why we love it:

Graphical Interface: No more editing complex web server files! Editors can add, update, and manage redirects directly through the Craft control panel.

Automatic Fallback: It includes a "catch-all" function to log 404 errors, allowing you to quickly identify and fix broken links and set up the necessary redirects.

SEO Protection: It ensures that when you change a page's slug or move content, the old URL correctly points to the new one, protecting your search ranking.

Retour is a non-negotiable for any new build where you're replacing an existing site.