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.
Craft CMS has minimum PHP version requirements that change with each major release. Craft 4 requires PHP 8.0.2 or later. Craft 5 requires PHP 8.2 or later. If your hosting provider upgrades the server to a PHP version your Craft installation doesn’t support, you’ll start seeing errors, or worse, silent failures where things stop working without any obvious message.
This is the most common reason we see emergency upgrades. The host moves to PHP 8.2, the site starts throwing errors, and a business owner is suddenly managing an urgent problem rather than a planned improvement.
Craft’s plugin ecosystem is one of its strengths, but it also creates dependencies. Plugins built for Craft 3 don’t work with Craft 4 or 5. When you upgrade Craft, every plugin your site depends on needs a compatible version available in the Plugin Store. Some plugins have been discontinued and have no Craft 4 or 5 equivalent, which means the upgrade involves finding and integrating replacements.
This is what catches most site owners off guard. A seemingly straightforward Craft upgrade becomes a more involved migration when a key plugin hasn’t been updated or has been abandoned.
Craft CMS releases security patches on a regular basis. Staying on an end-of-life major version means those patches aren’t available to you. If your site handles customer data, payment processing, or any authenticated user activity, running an unpatched CMS is a genuine risk.
Craft 3 reached end of life in April 2024 and no longer receives security updates. If your site is still running Craft 3, it’s operating without a safety net. The upgrade path from Craft 3 to Craft 5 requires going through Craft 4 as an intermediate step, which adds time and planning to the process.
The honest answer is that most businesses wait too long. A site running on Craft 3 with plugins that haven’t been updated in a couple of years is accumulating risk quietly. Upgrading incrementally, before you’re forced to, is almost always less expensive and less disruptive than responding to an emergency. The best time to plan an upgrade is before the pressure arrives.
If you are not sure whether your Craft CMS site is due an upgrade, get in touch with Karl for a straight answer.
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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. Problems can accumulate quietly over a long period before they become visible.
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 Craft CMS sites rely on third-party plugins to deliver important functionality. Those plugins are maintained by independent developers who may, at any point, stop supporting them. When that happens to a plugin your site depends on, you are facing a problem that your original agency may not have anticipated.
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 has been instrumental in delivering the ExpressionEngine development requirements for our client. Karl very quickly became part of our extended team as he is reliable, dependable and thorough in everything he does. Karl has a genuine desire to see his clients succeed and he will go out of his way to help them achieve that. Karl worked hard on our projects and was so helpful all along the way. He is driven, talented and an absolute pleasure to work with! Any organisation would be lucky to have Karl on their team.
Wayne Smallman
Octane Ltd.