Do I Need to Upgrade Craft 3?
Craft 3 reached end of life in April 2024. Learn why upgrading to Craft 4 or 5 is essential and what benefits you'll gain from modern versions.
Craft 3 had a good run. Released in 2018, it powered thousands of sites and was a big step up from Craft 2. As of April 2024 it's end of life. If you're still on it, you need to upgrade.
No more security updates
Once a version is end of life, patches stop. Any vulnerability found in Craft 3 after April 2024 won't be fixed, and your exposure grows with every month that passes.
PHP
Craft 3 runs on PHP 7.2 to 8.0 — all end of life themselves. Modern hosts default to PHP 8.1, 8.2, or 8.3. You can usually pin an older version, but you're working against the grain, and newer PHP is genuinely faster and more secure.
What you get by upgrading
Craft 4 added element chips, field layouts on global sets, improved asset handling, and performance work. Craft 5 builds on that with Twig 3, the redesigned element editor slides, more granular permissions, and a modernised plugin API.
Planning the upgrade
Craft 3 to 4 or 5 takes planning. Template syntax has moved on, deprecated features are gone, and plugins need compatible versions.
Pixel & Tonic's upgrade docs are thorough and the community has done a lot of these migrations. Craft 3 to 4 is usually straightforward, and 4 to 5 is smoother still. Custom plugins and complex templates need more care — anything unmaintained will have to be updated, replaced, or rebuilt.
Getting started
We've migrated plenty of sites off Craft 3. The work is: audit the current setup, identify the sticking points, run the upgrade in staging, then cut over with minimal disruption.
Andrew is Technical Director at Mutual, a Craft CMS Partner agency. He has been building with Craft CMS since its public beta in 2012 — working through every major version from Craft 1 to Craft 5 — and has delivered over 100 sites for clients including Apple, Transparency International, and Arts University Bournemouth.
He writes about Craft CMS on the Mutual blog and has contributed to net Magazine. At Mutual, he leads development of Mutual One, a marketing platform built on Craft CMS as its foundation.
He has spoken about Craft CMS to undergraduate students at the University of Brighton and Canterbury Christ Church University, and appeared on the Devmode.fm podcast. He has also trained development teams at other agencies in working with the platform.
