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. This isn’t a criticism: there’s no reason a business owner should need to understand the internals of their CMS. But it does mean that problems can accumulate quietly before they become visible.
Here’s what actually determines whether your Craft site is in good shape.
Craft 5 is the current release. Craft 3 reached end of life in April 2024 and no longer receives security updates. If your site is running Craft 3, it’s on an unsupported version. Craft 4 is still supported but Craft 5 is the version with the longest support runway.
You can check the Craft version from the control panel dashboard when you’re logged in, or ask your developer.
Craft CMS runs on PHP, which has its own version lifecycle. PHP 8.2 or 8.3 is current. PHP 7.x is end of life. Your hosting environment and your Craft version need to be compatible with each other.
If your host has moved to PHP 8.2 but your Craft installation was built for PHP 7.x, you’re likely already seeing problems. If it hasn’t happened yet, it will.
Craft’s plugins extend the platform significantly, and most non-trivial sites depend on several of them. Each plugin has its own version history and compatibility requirements. A plugin installed at launch may be out of date or incompatible with the current Craft version.
In the Craft control panel, check the Updates section. Any plugins showing as requiring updates, or flagged as incompatible, warrant attention. Abandoned plugins with no active maintainer are a longer-term concern worth identifying.
A basic but important check. Your site should be serving over HTTPS with a valid, current SSL certificate. Most hosting providers renew these automatically via Let’s Encrypt, but automatic renewal can fail. A browser warning about an expired certificate is something your customers will see before you do.
Does a reliable backup exist? Not just a backup that’s theoretically scheduled, but one that’s actually running, stored somewhere you can access, and tested. Craft has no built-in backup automation, so this depends on either the hosting environment or a managed solution. If you don’t know what your backup situation is, find out.
A Craft site in good shape should have a clean control panel with no persistent error messages and no unresolved queue jobs that have been failing silently. Queue failures in particular are worth checking: they often indicate integrations or background processes that have stopped working without anyone noticing.
Related Services
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.
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 workUpon completion of the Thornfields Primary Care Trust website, we had no hesitation on asking Expression 37 to help out with some further development updates with our main company website. As with the Thornfields project Karl and his team turned around our requests with flawless speed and efficiency, often adding further advice and guidance on how to best implement the features required. If you are looking for a tried and trusted ExpressionEngine specialist we strongly recommend these guys.
Chris Ibbetson - FPM Group General Manager.
First Practice Management Ltd.