Our favourite Craft CMS plugins

Craft CMS has become a thriving playground for developers, and its plugin marketplace reflects that.

Every day new plugins appear, existing ones receive fresh updates, and the overall collection keeps expanding — giving you more ways to make a site faster, smarter, and easier to manage. Because the ecosystem is always evolving, a Craft CMS powered site can stay at the cutting edge without a complete rebuild.

Unlike many other CMS platforms, Craft CMS’s core is intentionally powerful and flexible. Its templating engine, asset handling, user permissions, and content modeling give you the tools to build complex, custom experiences without needing a single third‑party add‑on. That said, plugins are not a crutch and whilst Craft CMS gives you the foundation; plugins give you the convenience.

The Craft CMS plugin landscape is a living, breathing ecosystem, and we’re excited to watch it keep expanding. Whether you’re a developer hunting for a niche utility or a site owner wanting a plug‑and‑play solution, the daily influx of new plugins means there’s always something fresh to explore or utilise.

Building and utilising plugins

At Cloud Gray we don’t just use great plugins; we also create them. Our team builds tools that solve the specific challenges we encounter on client projects, and we ship many of those tools back to the Craft CMS community.

• We rely on our own plugins for core functionality on most of the sites we launch.
• We also adopt excellent plugins from other studios when they fit the job better or add a unique capability we don’t need to reinvent.

The result is a carefully curated toolbox that blends the best of our own work with the finest contributions from the wider Craft CMS ecosystem. Some of our favourite third party plugins are:

Blitz

• Blitz - Intelligent static page caching for creating lightning-fast sites with Craft CMS. It significantly improves a site’s performance by reducing server response time.

ImageOptimize

• ImageOptimize - Automatically create and optimise responsive image transforms from your Craft CMS assets.

Navigation

• Navigation - Easily manage navigation menus for your Craft CMS website.

Retour

• Retour - An intelligent redirect manager built for Craft CMS. Handles 301s, 404s, and URL changes automatically, preserving SEO juice and user experience.

SEOmatic

• SEOmatic - Provides a flexible, all‑in‑one solution for meta tags, sitemaps, schema, and other modern SEO best practices.