Do I Need to Upgrade Craft 5?
Craft 5 is the latest major version and will become LTS when Craft 6 releases. Keep it updated with patches, but no major upgrade needed.
If you're on Craft 5, you're where you should be. It's the current major version, and there's no major upgrade ahead of you in the short term. That said, you still need to apply the minor and patch updates.
Keep applying updates
Craft 5 ships regular 5.x.x releases with security fixes, bug fixes, and small improvements. These are important to apply, and they don't need the planning overhead of a major version jump.
Most 5.x.x updates install cleanly from the control panel. Read the release notes, test in staging if you're being careful, then apply to production. Small frequent updates are much easier than big infrequent ones.
What happens when Craft 6 ships
Craft 6 is planned for late 2026 — see our When is Craft CMS 6 out? post. When it releases, Craft 5 automatically becomes Long-Term Support (LTS) and keeps receiving security updates for five years after Craft 6's GA release.
That's a useful position to be in. You won't need to rush onto Craft 6. You'll have years to evaluate it, wait for plugins to mature, and plan the move on your own timeline.
Should you plan for Craft 6 now?
Not really. Craft 6 is still in development and the specifics will move. That said, knowing Craft 6 moves from Yii 2 to Laravel is worth bearing in mind for any custom work you're doing now — the backward compatibility adapter should keep plugins running, but understanding the direction helps with present-day decisions.
Focus on building
The point of being on current, supported software is that you can stop worrying about the foundations and focus on the site. Use the time for content, features, performance, and the authoring experience.
Regular health checks
Even without a major upgrade pending, periodic reviews are worthwhile — plugin updates, PHP version, hosting config, security basics. We work with clients on retainer to handle all of this.
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.
