Resources

When you receive a proposal or an audit report and one of the technologies listed is Laravel, it is reasonable to pause. You know Craft CMS. You may not know Laravel. If your site depends on something you have never heard of, that can feel like a risk.

Craft CMS has announced it is rebuilding its foundations on Laravel, one of the most widely used PHP frameworks in the world. If you run a business on a Craft-powered site, this is the kind of change that can sound alarming but, handled correctly, is entirely manageable. Here is what you need to understand, and what the right response looks like depending on which version your site is running.

A meaningful part of the work we do at Expression 37 involves inheriting Craft CMS sites that were built by developers or agencies who are no longer involved. The circumstances vary, but the practical challenge is always similar: a site you didn’t build, with code you didn’t write, and decisions that were never documented.

If your Craft CMS site connects to any external service, whether that’s Stripe for payments, HubSpot or Salesforce for CRM, or Mailchimp for email, you have a dependency that you probably don’t think about until it fails. Integrations break. Here’s why they fail and what to do about it.

Craft CMS has a strong but relatively specialised developer community. The difference between someone who has built seriously with Craft and someone who has touched it once or twice is meaningful. If your site runs on Craft and you need ongoing development or support, knowing what to look for matters.

This is a distinction that matters more than most business owners realise, and it comes up in almost every conversation we have with someone whose Craft CMS site hasn’t had active support for a while. The site is working. Pages load, content can be updated, forms submit. But working and maintained are two different things.

Most business owners have no idea what state their Craft CMS site is actually in. They know it’s working, they can add content, and the forms are submitting. Beyond that, it’s a black box. Problems can accumulate quietly over a long period before they become visible.

The question most business owners ask is some version of: what will this cost? When it comes to Craft CMS support, the honest answer is that it depends on factors specific to your site. But there’s enough of a pattern to give you a useful framework.

Most businesses use multiple systems to run their operations: a CRM, an accounting package, a booking or scheduling tool, a stock management system. Their website, whether built on ExpressionEngine or Craft CMS, often sits apart from all of these, requiring manual data entry in both directions. That gap has a cost.

Most businesses with a Craft CMS site didn’t choose Craft themselves. A web agency built it, recommended the platform, and handled everything from launch onward. That arrangement works well until it doesn’t, and there are several ways it can stop working.

There’s no single answer to when you should upgrade your Craft CMS installation, but there are several clear signals that tell you it’s overdue. Most business owners don’t think about this until something goes wrong. By then, the upgrade is often more involved than it would have been if it had been handled earlier.

If your ExpressionEngine or Craft CMS site connects to any external service, whether that’s Stripe for payments, HubSpot or Salesforce for CRM, or Mailchimp for email, you have a dependency that you probably don’t think about until it fails.

When a Craft CMS site develops maintenance problems or the original agency moves on, one common suggestion is to migrate to WordPress. The reasoning usually sounds straightforward. But for many businesses, this recommendation deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives.

Most Craft CMS sites rely on third-party plugins to deliver important functionality. Those plugins are maintained by independent developers who may, at any point, stop supporting them. When that happens to a plugin your site depends on, you are facing a problem that your original agency may not have anticipated.

Craft CMS changed its licensing model from a one-off purchase to an annual subscription. If your site was built on Craft and you have not had this conversation with your developer, it is worth understanding what has changed and what the ongoing implications are for your costs.

The question I get asked most often by business owners is some version of: what will this cost? It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends on things that are specific to your site. But there’s enough of a pattern to give you a useful framework.