Craft 4 Is End of Life

Craft CMS 4 reached end of life on 30 April 2026. That date has been and gone. If your site is still running on Craft 4, it stopped getting security patches over a month ago, and it isn’t getting any more.

It’s not a scare story and your site didn’t switch itself off. But ​“unsupported” is now the actual state of things, not a future one, and the longer it sits the more it costs to deal with. So here’s the plain version of where you are and what to do about it.

What ​“end of life” means

Pixel & Tonic, the people who make Craft, support each major version for a set window. Roughly two years of active development after release, then a final year where the only thing they ship is security fixes. After that, nothing.

Craft 4 came out in May 2022. Its time ran out like this:

• 30 April 2025 – active support ended. No more features or general bug fixes.
• 30 April 2026 – security support ended. The one that matters. From that day, a hole found in Craft 4 doesn’t get patched. Ever.

Craft 5 has been out since March 2024, with active support until the end of 2030 and security patches all the way through to the end of 2031. That’s where you want to be.

What it means now that the date has passed

Nothing dramatic happened on the 1^st of May. That’s the trap. The site kept working exactly like it did the day before. The problems are quieter:

• Security is now your problem, not Pixel & Tonic’s. Any vulnerability found from here on stays open. On a CMS that runs your business, that’s a risk sitting there with no end date.
• Plugins are drifting away. Plugin developers have moved to Craft 5. Updates for your Craft 4 plugins are drying up, and the day a third-party API changes (Instagram, a payment provider, whatever) something quietly breaks with no fix coming.
• The job only gets bigger. Every month on Craft 4, your plugins and PHP version fall further behind, and the upgrade gets that bit more awkward.

The good news

If you remember the Craft 3 to 4 jump, relax. This isn’t that. Going from 4 to 5 is one of the smoother major upgrades Craft has done. For a lot of sites the core stuff just works.

The variable is almost always plugins. The upgrade is really an audit: which of your plugins have a Craft 5 version, which have been abandoned, and which have had their feature folded into Craft itself so you don’t need the plugin at all anymore. There’s usually a bit of that. Sometimes it’s a pleasant tidy-up.

You’ll also need a recent enough PHP version on the server, which is worth checking early because it occasionally needs a word with your host.

What to do now

1. Find out what version you’re on. If you don’t know, that’s fine, it takes two minutes to check.
2. List your plugins. That list is 90% of the work in any quote.
3. Don’t let it drift. You’re already past the deadline. The site won’t fall over tomorrow, but ​“unsupported and getting further behind” is not a state you want to leave running indefinitely.

That’s genuinely it. Craft 4 isn’t broken and the sky isn’t falling. But it’s unsupported now, today, and this is the kind of job that’s easy when it’s handled and annoying when it’s left.

If you’re on Craft 4 and want a straight answer on what your upgrade looks like, get in touch. Send me your plugin list and I’ll tell you where you stand.