Craft CMS is a PHP CMS, built on Yii and favoured by design studios and brands that want exact control over content structure. Its audience is smaller than WordPress, so finding an engineer who knows Craft well takes time. We provide developers for studio overflow, in-house teams and sites that lost their original builder.
What do you hire a Craft developer to do?
- Move a site from Craft 3 or 4 to Craft 5, including plugin and module changes.
- Redesign the content model with sections, entry types and Matrix, or move to the newer entries-based nested content.
- Build Twig templates from a design system, with caching that does not serve stale pages.
- Write custom modules and plugins for things the Plugin Store does not cover.
- Expose content through GraphQL for a decoupled frontend.
- Handle Craft Commerce stores, including checkout and payment gateway work.
What we vet for
- Candidates discuss when to use a Matrix field, when to relate entries and when to create a new section, and what that costs editors later.
- They use eager loading to avoid N+1 queries and know the template caching tags.
- They sync settings between environments through project config files and can resolve the conflicts.
- They read a plugin’s maintenance history before depending on it.
- They stay current on advisories, including the critical remote code vulnerabilities in 2025 releases.
Where do Craft projects go wrong?
Craft gives you few guardrails, which is its appeal and its risk. We see Matrix fields that hold a long list of block types because nobody wanted to create a section, templates that run a query per loop iteration, and plugins installed for one small feature. The cleanup is usually less dramatic than clients fear: a content model review, eager loading, and removing plugins that a small module can replace.
Licence costs matter for planning. Craft sells Solo, Team, Pro and Enterprise editions, with a year of updates included and a yearly fee after that, per the Craft pricing page. We check which edition your site needs before estimating, since it affects user accounts and support.
First weeks
We get repository and staging access, read the project config and templates, and list queries that run too often. The first shipped change is typically a fix to the heaviest template or a content model cleanup that editors notice straight away. Then we agree the larger plan with you.
What stack sits around Craft?
Craft runs on PHP with MySQL or Postgres, usually under Docker locally and a managed host or Craft Cloud in production. Frontends use Twig, or Vite with Vue or React, or Next.js through GraphQL. We match the developer to the setup you already run.
Engagement models
A dedicated Craft developer joins your sprint, optionally with a frontend or QA engineer as a team extension (see IT staff augmentation and dedicated team hiring). Upgrades and rebuilds suit a scoped project. Rates are $50 to $150 per hour, set by role and seniority.
When is a developer not enough?
For a rebuild or a headless frontend, use our Craft CMS development services. To compare Craft against other platforms, see the headless CMS developer hub.
