ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS are genuinely flexible platforms. They can handle a wide range of requirements, and many businesses have successfully extended them well beyond a basic content site. But there is a point at which adding the next feature to a CMS becomes more complicated, more expensive, and more fragile than the business problem justifies. Knowing where that line is saves significant time and money.
CMS platforms have strengths and limitations. When a business keeps pushing beyond what a CMS does naturally, the developer starts building workarounds. Each workaround is a custom layer that needs to be maintained, tested, and updated alongside the CMS itself. After several rounds of this, the site becomes difficult to change, slow to deploy updates to, and risky to upgrade. If your developer regularly describes solutions as workarounds, that is worth noting.
There are business processes that a CMS was not designed to handle efficiently. Complex pricing logic, real-time data handling, multi-step workflows with conditional branching, integrations with multiple third-party systems simultaneously. When these requirements land on a CMS, the result is usually slow, fragile, or both. If your ExpressionEngine or Craft CMS site regularly needs emergency fixes after updates, or if new features consistently take longer to build than expected, the platform may be the bottleneck.
The answer in these situations is not always to replace the CMS entirely. Often the right approach is to build a separate application, using something like Laravel, that handles the complex business logic, and connect it to the CMS site for the parts where content management genuinely belongs. This separation means each component does what it is designed for, rather than one system trying to do everything.
The test is not the feature itself. It is the cost and risk of delivering it on the current platform versus a better-suited one, and the long-term maintenance cost of what gets built. A developer who knows both CMS platforms and custom application development can make that assessment honestly. One who only works within a CMS will naturally try to deliver everything within that CMS, regardless of whether that is the right answer for your business.
If you are weighing up whether a new feature still makes sense on your current CMS, get in touch with Karl for an honest opinion.
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Most business websites are built on content management systems. That makes sense for most situations. But there are cases where a CMS is the wrong tool, and the gap between what a CMS can do and what a business needs it to do creates ongoing friction, cost, and limitation. Knowing when a bespoke solution makes more sense is a useful thing to understand.
Custom software development has a higher upfront cost than buying a subscription to an existing tool or adding another plugin to your CMS. That cost is often the reason businesses do not pursue it. But in the right circumstances, the return on a bespoke application is clear, measurable, and often much faster than expected.
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 workI cannot recommend Karl highly enough for his expertise and professionalism during our website upgrade. The transition from ExpressionEngine v2 to v7 was a significant undertaking, but Karl managed the entire process seamlessly, ensuring that every detail was addressed. The update of over 70 add-ons and 10 custom plugins was executed flawlessly, and the custom enhancements to our E-Commerce Store module have greatly improved our online shopping experience. The move to a more secure dedicated server has given us peace of mind regarding our site's performance and security. Karl’s dedication to our project was evident at every stage, and the final result is a modern, efficient website that truly represents our brand. Thank you for your hard work!"
Lisa Sanderson ~ Director
Graham Sanderson Interiors Ltd.