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 A plugin installed at launch may be out of date or incompatible with the current Craft version.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.
If you want to know exactly what state your Craft CMS site is in, get in touch with Karl for an assessment.
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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.
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.
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.
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 founded Expression 37 in 2007 and has worked exclusively with ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS ever since. He does not take on work in other platforms and does not hand work to other developers. Expression 37 is deliberately small, because the kind of support that matters to clients with business-critical sites is specific to their site, not something that scales in the conventional sense. If you work with Expression 37, you work with Karl.
Find out how we workWorking with Karl on our ExpressionEngine website was an absolute game-changer for Define Creative. His expertise in translating our PSD layouts into a fully functional and visually stunning website was impressive. The meticulous attention to detail in custom HTML and CSS coding ensured that our brand identity was perfectly captured and maintained across all devices. The integration of ExpressionEngine has made managing our content effortless, and the user experience improvements have significantly enhanced visitor engagement. Karl’s commitment to performance optimisation has resulted in a smooth and efficient site that reflects our dedication to innovative design solutions. We couldn’t be happier with the final product and look forward to future collaborations!
Sarah Whitehead ~ Founder and Managing Director at Define Creative Design Ltd.
Define Creative