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.
The most common reason is not that WordPress is the best platform for your specific needs. It is that WordPress is what most agencies know. A generalist web agency that does not have deep Craft CMS expertise will naturally recommend the platform they are most comfortable with. That is understandable from their perspective. It is not necessarily the right answer for your business.
A migration to WordPress solves one problem: finding an agency to support the site. There are significantly more WordPress developers available than Craft CMS specialists. If your primary concern is ongoing support availability, that argument has some merit. But it is worth being clear that this is the specific problem being solved, and that it comes at a significant cost.
A platform migration is not a maintenance task. It is a rebuild. Your content, your URLs, your custom fields, your integrations, and your templates all need to be recreated in a new platform. Even a straightforward content site involves substantial work. A site with complex custom field structures, workflows, or integrations may take as long to rebuild as the original site took to build. That is a real cost that is sometimes understated in migration proposals.
WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world, which makes it the most frequently targeted by automated attacks. WordPress sites require regular core, theme, and plugin updates, and the security exposure from running outdated WordPress installations is well documented. Moving to WordPress does not mean moving to a lower-maintenance platform. It means trading one maintenance responsibility for another.
A Craft CMS site that has fallen out of active maintenance can be brought back into a well-supported state without a platform migration. The underlying platform is sound. What it needs is a developer who actually knows Craft, a current licence, and a maintenance arrangement that keeps it up to date. If that is what is available, the migration discussion becomes unnecessary.
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.
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 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.
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.
Get in touch with KarlTrusted by established businesses and growing brands across the UK
Expression 37 works with a small number of clients at any one time. These are some of them.
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