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.
A typical Craft CMS site might use plugins for form handling, search, SEO metadata, e-commerce, user management, custom field types, or third-party integrations. Each of those plugins is a dependency. If any one of them is abandoned or becomes incompatible with a newer version of Craft, the functionality it provides is at risk. In some cases, this is a cosmetic inconvenience. In others, it is the functionality your business depends on to process enquiries, take orders, or present critical information to users.
Plugin developers are, in many cases, individual developers or small teams who maintain these tools alongside other work. When their priorities change, when a major Craft version requires too much rework to be commercially viable, or when they simply move on, plugin support ends. This is not unusual or irresponsible. It is a structural feature of relying on an ecosystem built by independent contributors.
An abandoned plugin does not usually cause an immediate catastrophic failure. More often, it stops receiving updates. It may fall out of compatibility with the next Craft minor release, or stop working correctly after a PHP upgrade. The site continues to function until the next round of changes, at which point the incompatibility surfaces.
The moment when plugin abandonment becomes most costly is during a Craft version upgrade. Each major version upgrade requires checking every installed plugin for compatibility. Plugins that have been abandoned have no upgrade path. You are left choosing between staying on an older Craft version, replacing the plugin's functionality with something else, or building a replacement. None of these are fast or trivial.
The practical approach is maintaining awareness of the plugins your site depends on and their current support status. An annual review of installed plugins against the developer's release activity takes a small amount of time but gives you early warning of plugins that are drifting toward abandonment. That early warning is what allows you to plan a replacement on your schedule rather than under pressure when something breaks.
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.
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.
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.
Most clients come to us when their site has started to feel like a risk rather than an asset. Whether the agency relationship has ended, an upgrade has been delayed, or the site has simply grown beyond what it can handle, a conversation costs nothing.
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Karl is the founder of Expression 37 Ltd and has been working exclusively with ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS since 2007. In eighteen years he has supported more than 80 clients across the UK, from long-term retainer arrangements to emergency rescues when something has gone wrong at the worst possible moment. Every piece of work is handled personally by Karl, with no account managers or junior developers between you and the person doing it.
Find out how we workIt's always a nervous decision making the right choice of web provider when you have a large-scale project to be developed such as the York GPVTS website. Thankfully we made the right choice going with Karl at Expression 37. Karl has been excellent throughout the whole process of the project, working very closely with me and other members of the York GPVTS staff to ensure the site was built to our exact requirements. The end result has been truly impressive and we have had fantastic feedback from both internal staff and the specialist trainee doctors that use the site on a regular basis. Since the site has launched we have requested numerous development updates and modifications that are typically required of a project at this level. Karl has never failed to deliver these requests, often adding new ideas and suggestions to help improve the scope of our initial ideas. If you are looking for a solid, reliable, and friendly web developer, then Karl is your man!
Stuart Calder - GP Training Programme Director
NHS York GPVTS