Upgrading or rebuilding your website might seem like an impossible task, all that content, the backend integration, we get it, but at Frontmedia our 10+ years experience working with Umbraco CMS means your upgrade from version 8 to 14 needn’t be difficult. Learn more below or contact us to discuss your site today.
Umbraco will be withdrawing support for version 8 on February 24th 2025. Your website will remain live and usable after this date, but Umbraco will no longer be monitoring version 8 or providing security patches and updates.
So should you upgrade? The short answer is probably yes, but read on below to find out why.
The web is constantly developing, browsers update or fall by the wayside, coding standards change and new technologies bring new challenges not least with security. Umbraco CMS is no exception to this evolution.
After version 8, the whole Umbraco CMS was rewritten to introduce a raft of improvements to the user experience. The speed of the interface is drastically improved alongside much greater flexibility for content editing. Upgrading Umbraco is about more than just code, it's an upgrade to the whole user experience.
Umbraco 8 introduced the need for syntax updates to the code of older sites and a new look for the CMS and a lot of new features to make content editing quicker and easier.
Umbraco 10 saw the switch to .NET Core from .NETFramework, a fundamental change in codebase that requires a rewrite of more than just a few lines of code. Moving a site from 7 to 10 is the most difficult part of the upgrade process but once your site is on Umbraco 10, the steps onwards are relatively simple and the path to future upgrades is smoothed by Umbraco's decision to have their improvements align with .NET's upgrade path.
We know it's a lot of numbers and talk about paths and code, but upgrading your website to at least Umbraco 10 will ensure it remains secure whilst being easier to maintain in the future.
Whilst an upgrade is important, in many cases a new design and rebuild of the site, directly on the latest version of Umbraco (i.e. rebuilding the site from scratch), may be just as cost-effective as an upgrade, making it a great opportunity to redesign or modernise the look and feel of your website whilst taking advantage of the latest features and security Umbraco offers.
Some Umbraco websites would be better upgraded, some would be easier to rebuild. If you think you’d like our help or just have some questions about the process, we’d love to hear from you. We are happy to provide you with a free, no-obligation quote, so get in touch.