Most businesses with a Craft CMS site didn’t choose Craft themselves. A web agency built it, recommended the platform, and handled everything from launch onward. That arrangement works well until it doesn’t, and there are several ways it can stop working.
The agency might fold. It might pivot away from Craft to a different stack. The relationship might break down. The key contact might leave, taking their knowledge of your site with them. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: you’re left with a business-critical website and no one who properly understands it.
In the best case, you’ll have access to your hosting control panel, your domain registrar, your Craft control panel, and a well-organised codebase with a Composer setup you can work with. In practice, the reality is often messier. Access credentials may be missing or held by the agency. Hosting and domains may be registered in the agency’s name. Custom plugins may exist with no documentation explaining how they work or why certain decisions were made.
Craft’s licensing model adds another layer: if the license key is registered to the agency’s account, you’ll need to transfer it. The same applies to any paid plugins purchased through the Plugin Store.
The hardest part of taking over a Craft site isn’t usually the technical work. It’s reconstructing the knowledge that existed only in someone else’s head. Things like: why a particular plugin was chosen, how a specific Matrix field layout works and what content editors rely on it for, what that queued job is doing and whether it’s still needed, why the entry types are structured the way they are.
None of this is in the code. It was in the agency’s institutional knowledge, and now that knowledge is gone.
The first priority is access. Get control of your hosting account, domain registration, Craft license, and CMS login. If the agency registered any of these on your behalf, recovering them ranges from straightforward to complicated depending on how cooperative they are.
Once access is secure, the next step is a proper technical audit: what version of Craft is running, what plugins are installed and whether they’re current, what the server environment looks like, and whether there’s a reliable backup in place.
With access secured and the audit done, you’re in a position to make informed decisions. Some sites come across in good shape and just need a developer to maintain continuity. Others have accumulated technical debt, outdated plugins, or configuration problems that need addressing before ongoing support makes sense. Knowing which situation you’re in is the starting point for everything else.
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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 workWe have known Karl for a good number of years now and he has always been there for us providing a top class level of service. Karl always brings that level of dedication and professionalism to the table that you would expect. Trustworthy and reliable, and a great asset to our workflow.
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