Why “The Site Still Works” Is Not the Same as “The Site Is Being Maintained”

Posted by: Karl Bowers | April 01 2026

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. From the outside, everything looks fine. But working and maintained are two very different things, and the gap between them has a cost that compounds over time.

The serviced car analogy

The closest equivalent is a car that hasn’t been serviced in three years. It might still get you from A to B. The engine runs, the brakes work, you can drive it. But the oil hasn’t been changed, the brake pads haven’t been checked, and the timing belt is overdue. It works, but it isn’t maintained. The risk isn’t that it breaks down today. The risk is that when something does fail, it’s more serious and more expensive than it would have been.

A Craft CMS site follows the same logic.

What goes wrong when nothing is actively maintained

PHP versions move forward. Your hosting provider will eventually upgrade the server to a newer PHP version. Craft 4 requires PHP 8.0.2 or later. Craft 5 requires PHP 8.2 or later. If the server moves and your Craft version isn’t compatible, the site stops working. Not gradually: it either works or it doesn’t.

Security vulnerabilities accumulate. Craft CMS releases security patches, but those patches only help you if you apply them. An unpatched installation becomes progressively more exposed over time.

Plugins drift out of compatibility. Craft’s plugin ecosystem is maintained by independent developers. Plugins receive updates, drop support for older Craft versions, and occasionally stop being maintained entirely. If you’re not tracking this, you won’t know until something breaks.

Third-party integrations change. If your site connects to Stripe, Mailchimp, HubSpot, or any other external platform, those platforms update their APIs. Integrations built against an older API version can stop working without warning.

Queue jobs fail silently. Craft uses a background queue for tasks like sending emails and processing images. If the queue processor stops running, these tasks fail silently. Your site appears to work, but emails aren’t sending and assets aren’t being transformed.

The compounding cost

Each of these problems is manageable in isolation and at an early stage. Together, and after years of accumulation, they become a significant remediation project. The cost of getting an unmaintained site back into a healthy state is almost always higher than the cost of maintaining it would have been.

Working and maintained are not the same thing. For a business-critical website, only one of them is acceptable.

Posted by: Karl Bowers
Posted in: Craft CMS
Post Date: April 01 2026 View all latest posts