I Hate Frontend: How Craftum Made Development Easier
How Craftum helped me simplify frontend development without Bootstrap or TailwindCSS. A developer's review of a website builder for programmers. Fast load times, ready-made blocks, minimal effort.
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Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against JavaScript. But I’m not a big fan of using Bootstrap, spending hours hunting for a decent TailwindCSS theme, or writing my own “CSS framework.” It’s just not my thing.
Starting a new project
Writing a backend? Easy. Writing a frontend? Also fine. But when it comes to styling the site, things get really depressing. You just want to give up on the whole thing or hire a designer. :melting_face:
How Craftum saved me
I never used to look twice at website builders. No matter how modern they are, I can write a frontend myself that’s more flexible and functional. Why would I need one? That’s something for people who don’t understand development at all.
But Craftum won me over because I work there (lol), it’s not expensive, and I can configure all the styles myself inside the builder.
Problems
Plenty of users complain that you can’t build an online store, a proper blog, or a personal account area. That’s a real issue, sure, but not for me.
Solutions
I spun up an API on the cheapest hosting I could find. I built the entire frontend, including the service’s internal pages, in Craftum. I came up with my own “template language,” meaning a way to identify variables on the page.
And from there, it’s just capable hands, VanillaJS, and off you go. Five minutes of fine-tuning, and I got a PageSpeed score of 95%+. That kind of score is sometimes impossible to reach on something like Nuxt, because of its complicated rendering logic. Here, though, you get a site built the way things were back in your younger days: HTML + JS + CSS. Nothing else needed.
Bottom line
What do we get:
- Fast loading
- No layout work and ready-made blocks
- You can offload the JavaScript to some GPT
- Write your backend and don’t stress about the rest!
That said, I eventually moved away from Craftum for the blog itself — details in the article Hugo vs Craftum: a comparison for a developer’s blog . But for landing pages and simple projects, Craftum is still a great choice. And if you need help with code, try Cursor AI .