It is more common than most people realise. A business has been running an ExpressionEngine site for years, the relationship with the agency that built it gradually fades, and eventually there is no-one actively looking after the site. Understanding why this happens helps you know what to do about it.
Unlike WordPress, ExpressionEngine is not something most web agencies pick up as a side competency. It requires proper familiarity to work with well. As the market for WordPress and Shopify development has grown, many agencies that once worked across multiple platforms have consolidated their offering. ExpressionEngine expertise has become rarer, which means that if your original agency pivots away from it, finding a replacement with genuine platform knowledge is harder.
The agency that built your site five years ago may have changed ownership, changed focus, lost key staff, or scaled back to a smaller team. The individual developer who understood your site inside and out may have left. The agency may still technically exist but no longer have the expertise to support your specific platform and configuration.
When an agency relationship ends, a proper handover should include documentation, credentials, and a briefing on the site's architecture. In practice, this rarely happens in a structured way. More often, the relationship simply drifts to an end. The business is left with access to the site but without the context that made the agency's support valuable.
The first step is to establish what you have. That means gathering all credentials, identifying the hosting provider, determining the current EE version, and taking stock of which addons are installed and what they do. A structured audit of this kind gives you a baseline from which a new support arrangement can begin.
The second step is to find specialist support. A generalist web developer who does not know ExpressionEngine is not the right answer. The platform has its own conventions, its own upgrade path, and its own ecosystem of addons. Working with someone who understands that will cost less in the long run than working with someone who is learning the platform on your budget.
If you currently have agency support and are reading this because the relationship feels uncertain, the sensible thing to do is not to wait until the relationship ends. A proper transition or a documented support arrangement, established while the existing agency is still engaged, is considerably less disruptive than trying to reconstruct context after the fact.
If your agency has abandoned your ExpressionEngine site, get in touch with Karl to talk through your options.
Related Services
Most businesses with an ExpressionEngine site didn’t choose ExpressionEngine themselves. A web agency built the site, recommended the CMS, and handled everything from launch onward. That arrangement works well until it doesn’t, and there are several ways it can stop working.
A significant part of the work we do at Expression 37 involves inheriting ExpressionEngine 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.
This is a distinction that matters more than most business owners realise. The site is working. Pages load, content can be updated, forms submit. From the outside, everything looks fine. But working and maintained are two very different things, and the gap between them has a cost that compounds over time.
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 workWe recently got in touch with Karl to help with some issues we were having with our site. All issues were dealt with in a very quick, efficient manner. Whilst our requests have only been minor ones, Karl's commitment to helping us out has been first class, and we would thoroughly recommend him!
Loretta Jones
Leeds Mencap