Getting your Craft CMS website ready for production

I’ve never really liked working with CMSes (and I’ve tried quite a few!), since it often feels like you’re spending more time working around limitations of the CMS and cutting corners to make content editable for your customers, instead of focussing on building quality web experiences.

Since I stumbled across Craft CMS a few years back, however, I haven’t really looked back. The blank-slate approach of Craft — no default templates, no boilerplate code — makes it easier than ever to build an experience exactly in the way you had it in mind. By now, our agency Infowijs has built more than a dozen Craft sites, and every time we build a site we learn something new that we love about Craft.

Here’s our most important steps in getting those beautiful websites ready for launch:

Image transforms everywhere

After our initial build of a site has been approved by the customer, one of the first things we do is search for all instances of .url in our Twig templates, and create appropriate image transforms that scale images to be the perfect size and quality for every part of the page.

That’s as easy as:

1. Creating a new transform, choose a crop mode, enter width and height, and choose an image quality and format.