Ask most business owners what their ExpressionEngine support arrangement covers and you will get a vague answer: they have a developer they can call, or they have someone who handles it. What that means in practice varies enormously. Knowing what good ongoing ExpressionEngine support looks like helps you assess whether what you have is adequate or whether it is a gap waiting to cause a problem.
ExpressionEngine releases updates regularly. Some are minor, some address security vulnerabilities, some are major version changes that require more significant work. Proper ongoing support includes monitoring for updates, assessing what each update means for your specific installation, and applying them in a way that tests for compatibility before anything goes live. This is not glamorous work, but the businesses that stay on current versions avoid the much larger cost of deferred upgrades.
Most ExpressionEngine sites depend on third-party addons. Those addons have their own update cycles, their own support lifecycles, and their own compatibility requirements. Good ongoing support includes keeping track of which addons are installed, whether they are being maintained by their developers, and whether they are compatible with the current EE and PHP versions. Addons that are silently falling out of support are one of the most common causes of urgent problems on ExpressionEngine sites.
A site that is running but running slowly is a business problem, not just a technical one. Proper ongoing support includes monitoring how your site performs, not just whether it loads. If page speed is deteriorating, if uptime drops, or if error rates increase, your developer should know about it before you do.
Even well-maintained sites have incidents. A payment integration stops working. The site goes down during a busy period. A template breaks after a server change. When that happens, the difference between a genuine support arrangement and an informal one becomes very clear. Proper support means a known response time, a clear process for raising urgent issues, and a developer who knows your site well enough to diagnose problems quickly.
The value of proper ongoing support is not visible when everything is working. It becomes visible when something does not. The businesses that invest in genuine ongoing ExpressionEngine support consistently spend less on emergency fixes, carry less risk, and have a clearer picture of the health of one of their most important business assets.
If you want to know what proper ongoing ExpressionEngine support should look like, get in touch with Karl.
Related Services
Related Case Studies
The question I get asked most often by business owners is some version of: what will this cost? It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends on things that are specific to your site. But there’s enough of a pattern to give you a useful framework.
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 workKarl at Expression 37 has been essential in keeping our Craft CMS website running at its best. His regular updates and fine-tuning ensure that our site is always up-to-date, secure, and optimised for performance. Karl’s expertise and attention to detail mean we can rely on him for everything from routine maintenance to customised site tweaks. It’s a relief to know our website is in such capable hands with Expression 37. Highly recommended!
Kimberley Clayton-Bull ~ Head of Marketing & Communications
Capula