Your website goes down on a Tuesday morning. You email your agency. Nothing back by lunch. Nothing by end of day. By Thursday you've called twice and left a voicemail.
If this sounds familiar, you're not imagining it. Response times from web agencies have got worse across both ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS sites. The cause is usually how the agency manages its own capacity: how many clients it has taken on, how support is staffed, and how tickets get routed internally.
Most agencies price support as an afterthought. A client signs up for a build, gets a small retainer added on, and the agency books in more clients than it can realistically support at that price. When 40 clients are sharing 2 developers, your ticket sits in a queue behind everyone else's.
Staff turnover makes it worse. If the developer who built your site has left, whoever picks up your ticket has to relearn your codebase before they can even diagnose the problem. That alone can add days.
Some agencies also route support through account managers who don't code. Your email gets read, forwarded, and re-explained to a developer who wasn't in the original conversation. Every handoff adds a delay and a chance for details to get lost.
For a site that just needs occasional updates, a 3 day wait is annoying. For a business-critical site, a store, a client portal, a lead generation engine, it's a different problem.
Every hour a checkout is broken is lost revenue. Every day a form silently fails is leads you'll never know you missed. A security patch that sits unactioned for a week is a longer window for something to go wrong. Each of these compounds quietly, as a drain on revenue and trust that's hard to trace back to its cause.
A few questions tend to surface the problem before it becomes a crisis:
If you don't know the answer to most of these, that's the exposure. Not knowing is the risk.
A response time should be written down, not implied. A named contact who knows your site, not a ticket number. A clear escalation path for anything that affects revenue directly, kept separate from routine requests.
ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS are both stable, capable systems. The problem sitting underneath most slow response times is agency capacity, not the software.
If you're relying on a guess about how quickly your agency would respond if your site went down today, it's worth finding out before you need to. We offer a free audit that looks at your current setup, your support arrangement, and where the gaps are. Get in touch and we'll tell you plainly what we find.
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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 workWorking with Karl on our ExpressionEngine website was an absolute game-changer for Define Creative. His expertise in translating our PSD layouts into a fully functional and visually stunning website was impressive. The meticulous attention to detail in custom HTML and CSS coding ensured that our brand identity was perfectly captured and maintained across all devices. The integration of ExpressionEngine has made managing our content effortless, and the user experience improvements have significantly enhanced visitor engagement. Karl’s commitment to performance optimisation has resulted in a smooth and efficient site that reflects our dedication to innovative design solutions. We couldn’t be happier with the final product and look forward to future collaborations!
Sarah Whitehead ~ Founder and Managing Director at Define Creative Design Ltd.
Define Creative