When you receive a proposal or an audit report and one of the technologies listed is Laravel, it is reasonable to pause. You know Craft CMS. You may not know Laravel. If your site depends on something you have never heard of, that can feel like a risk.
It is not. If your Craft CMS site was built with a Laravel front-end, that is a considered architectural choice, and right now it is one that puts you ahead of the curve.
Craft CMS manages your content. It is where your editors work, where entries are created, where fields and sections are structured. But content management is only half of what a website does. Something also needs to take that content and turn it into what visitors see, the pages, the navigation, the layouts.
On a traditional Craft site, Craft handles both sides. On a headless setup, those responsibilities are separated. Craft handles content, and a dedicated front-end application handles what visitors see. In this case, that application is built on Laravel.
Laravel is a well-established PHP framework with a large developer community and active maintenance. It is not an obscure or experimental technology. It is the kind of foundation that developers reach for when they want something reliable and well-supported for the long term.
Not every Craft site uses this architecture. A developer choosing a headless setup with a separate Laravel front-end is making a deliberate call. It gives them more control over performance, more flexibility in how content is delivered, and a cleaner separation between content management and front-end code. It tends to suit more complex sites where those trade-offs are worth making.
If your site was built this way, it was not accidental.
Craft CMS is moving its own foundations to Laravel. As we covered in a recent post, Craft 6 will switch its internal framework from Yii 2 to Laravel, the same framework your front-end may already be running on. The authoring experience and content structure carry over, but what sits underneath is changing.
If your site was already built with a Laravel front-end, your development team is already working with the architecture Craft itself is now moving toward. The technology your developer chose is not incidental. It is where the platform is heading.
When Craft 6 arrives, every Craft site will eventually need migrating. For sites on Craft 5, the timeline is comfortable, with Long-Term Support through at least 2031.
But the complexity of that migration depends significantly on how your site is built today. For sites with a Laravel front-end already in place, the upgrade path is considerably simpler. The front-end layer is architecturally aligned with Craft 6. A developer who built your site this way, and understands both Craft and Laravel, is well placed to carry it forward without rebuilding from scratch.
For sites on a more conventional setup, the same migration is achievable, but there is more ground to cover.
Seeing Laravel in a proposal is a signal that your developer understood where the platform was heading and built accordingly. That is the kind of decision that makes a site easier to maintain and upgrade as the platform evolves.
The more useful question is whether you still have the right developer in place. Understanding how your site is built, and having someone who can navigate what is coming, matters more than the technology name itself.
If you are not sure how your site is structured, or whether you have the right technical relationship in place for the road ahead, that is exactly where we can help. We carry out Craft CMS site reviews covering architecture, version status, plugin health, and forward planning. Get in touch to discuss your site.
Craft CMS has announced it is rebuilding its foundations on Laravel, one of the most widely used PHP frameworks in the world. If you run a business on a Craft-powered site, this is the kind of change that can sound alarming but, handled correctly, is entirely manageable. Here is what you need to understand, and what the right response looks like depending on which version your site is running.
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.
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.
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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 workOur ExpressionEngine site had been neglected for a while and we were aware it needed a proper upgrade, but we were nervous about the disruption that might cause. Expression 37 carried out a thorough assessment first and gave us a clear picture of what was involved before any work began. The upgrade was handled with no downtime and the site has been running much more reliably ever since. We now have ongoing support in place and the peace of mind that any issues will be dealt with quickly by someone who genuinely understands the system.
Sarah Connolly - Head of Operations
Propel London