CMS Migration: Why Growing Organisations Migrate to Umbraco and Umbraco Cloud

Why so many sites are due for CMS migration

If you look after a complex site built on Sitecore, Kentico, WordPress, Typo3 or a similar platform, you are likely facing repeat discussions about upgrades, licensing and hosting. The timing is not a coincidence.

Several market facts are pushing CMS migration into the 2025–2026 period:

• Product lifecycles are changing. Kentico Xperience 13 reaches the end of its support window in late 2026, and organisations are encouraged to move to Xperience by Kentico, which is not a routine patch but a different product with a new SaaS delivery model.

• Sitecore strategy is cloud-first. Sitecore is strongly promoting XM Cloud as its strategic direction while XP and classic XM move onto a slower path. For teams that use XP today, the move to XM Cloud often feels closer to a rebuild than an in-place update.

• WordPress security alerts keep coming. Security alerts in the WordPress plugin landscape keep growing, especially in third party plugins and themes. One report recorded 7,966 new vulnerabilities related to WordPress components in 2024 alone, almost all of them outside the main WordPress software. Several widely used plugins have had critical issues affecting hundreds of thousands of sites.

• Umbraco 17 is an LTS release. Umbraco 17 has arrived as a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, with three years of standard support and the option of extended maintenance. This gives a steady planning horizon for teams thinking about CMS migration.
  
  

If you already know that a move is coming in the next three years, putting it off rarely makes the work smaller. Planning CMS migration to Umbraco in this window lets you work on your own terms instead of racing to catch up later.

Where WordPress starts to strain

A large share of enquiries around CMS migration come from organisations that built serious sites on WordPress. WordPress has served them well, but over time several patterns show up.

Plugin stacks become too heavy

Enterprise WordPress builds depend on long lists of plugins for forms, caching, SEO, media handling, admin tools and custom blocks. Security reports across 2023 and 2024 show that the vast majority of new vulnerabilities in this area sit in plugins and themes, not in WordPress itself.

For a single marketing site this may be acceptable. For a national portal, a banking site or a group of NGO sites, the attack surface becomes harder to manage. Every new plugin brings another release cycle to track and another audit question to answer.

Governance and content workflows feel bolted on

Public bodies, regulators and NGOs care deeply about content accuracy and who approved which change. They need review steps, audit trails and permissions that reflect the organisation chart.

Those features can be added to WordPress, but they usually rely on another layer of plugins and custom work. Editors end up jumping between multiple admin screens, and changes to one plugin can have side effects in others.

Umbraco, by contrast, treats content types, roles and workflows as first class concerns. Editors work in one back office, and development teams have one place to extend and integrate.

Fit with .NET and cloud standards

Many organisations now standardise on .NET and Azure for internal development. WordPress can still run in those environments, though it rarely feels like a natural inhabitant.

Umbraco 17 runs on current .NET and aligns with Azure services, container platforms and modern monitoring tools. When CMS migration moves you towards a technology stack your teams already know, support and future enhancements become easier to plan.

Why so many CMS migrations land on Umbraco

When owners and technology leads look at CMS migration options, Umbraco appears because it combines stability, openness and editor experience in a way that is hard to ignore.

Long-term support and transparent timetable

Umbraco follows a regular pattern of releases. Every fourth major release becomes an LTS, with defined dates for security fixes and bug support. Version 17 is the latest LTS and is built on .NET 8.

This structure means a team that migrates to Umbraco 17 today can plan upgrades for years ahead, instead of reacting to short notice on end-of-support dates.

Proven for public sector, NGOs and complex private estates

Umbraco has long roots in Scandinavian and wider European public work. Ministries, municipalities, universities and NGOs use it for multilingual content, service portals and self-service flows. Many private firms also use Umbraco for multi-brand or multi-country estates.

Editors get an interface that is quick to learn. Developers gain a .NET base that works well with authentication, CRM, search and line-of-business integrations that often already exist in those environments.

Freedom in hosting and operations

Some CMS products now only run in one hosted environment under the supplier’s control. That brings convenience but can make data placement, network layout and security reviews more difficult.

Umbraco keeps options open. You can:

• Host Umbraco yourself in your own cloud tenancy or data centre

• Use Umbraco Cloud, with Umbraco managing environments and upgrades on top of Azure

• Use a hybrid pattern if part of the stack needs to stay on premises

For sectors with strong data law obligations, that flexibility removes one barrier to CMS migration.

Another benefit: a dual-shore delivery model that still feels close

One more advantage rarely discussed in product brochures is how the delivery partner works.

If you work with an Umbraco Gold Partner that combines senior consultants in Europe with an Umbraco development team in India, you can:

• Keep strategy, UX and governance work led by people who understand your local rules and stakeholder landscape

• Draw on a larger pool of experienced Umbraco developers and testers in India for day-to-day engineering and long-running enhancements

Handled well, this gives you the scale benefits of offshore delivery without losing the local context that matters in public work and regulated industries.

What CMS migration to Umbraco looks like

CMS migration does not have to be dramatic. Successful programmes follow a steady pattern with well understood checkpoints.

1. Assessment and CMS migration plan

The partner starts by mapping:

• Current platforms, content types, languages and key user groups

• Integrations with identity providers, CRMs, search, payment tools and other applications

• Hosting, compliance and security expectations

• Goals for the new platform, such as faster content release, a better editor experience or more robust workflows

From there you can build a CMS migration plan that roughly sizes the work and sets a sensible order of steps.

2. Umbraco design and integration approach

Next phase focuses on how Umbraco should look and behave for your organisation:

• Content schema shaped around services and user needs rather than legacy templates

• Components and layouts that can be reused across sites and campaigns

• Integration patterns for CRM, search, marketing tools and specialist back-office platforms

• Accessibility and language support built into templates for public sites

This design step becomes the reference for development and testing.

3. Build, Umbraco Cloud migration setup and automation

Once design is in place, the build can proceed. Where Umbraco Cloud migration is part of the plan, this step includes:

• Creating development, test and live environments in Umbraco Cloud

• Setting up deployment pipelines so code changes move in a controlled way

• Putting monitoring, logging and backup routines in place on top of Azure
  
  

At this stage a large share of the work can be handled by the Umbraco development team in India, guided by technical leads and product owners in Europe.

4. Content migration and parallel running

Moving content is often the most visible part of CMS migration. Typical work here includes:

• Automated migration of structured content where that is possible

• Manual review and rewrite of key pages, especially for high-traffic services and conversion paths

• Redirect planning to protect search performance and user bookmarks

A short period where the new Umbraco site runs in a test environment beside the live legacy platform lets editors gain confidence before launch.

5. Launch and long-term support

After launch, attention moves to stability and improvement. A capable Umbraco agency or Umbraco partner will provide:

• Support agreements with response times that match your risk profile

• A steady release rhythm for new features and performance tuning

• Advice on search, accessibility and content structure as your organisation changes

Here again, the dual-shore setup helps. Local leads stay close to your stakeholders, while the offshore team keeps the Umbraco platform moving forward.

Key points if you are considering CMS migration

If you are considering CMS migration in the next few years, keep four points in mind:

1. Many older releases of established CMS products are near the end of their planned support windows or moving towards new cloud-only offerings.

2. WordPress remains useful for smaller sites, but plugin-driven risk and governance gaps make it harder to defend in high-profile or regulated scenarios.

3. Umbraco 17, as an LTS release, offers a modern .NET base with a defined support horizon and the option of Umbraco Cloud migration.

4. A partner with both local consulting strength and an Umbraco development team in India gives you reach without losing context.

The best next step, not a hard sell

If CMS migration is on your mind, the most helpful next step is often a structured conversation rather than a quote.

An experienced Umbraco partner can:

• Review your current platforms at a high level

• Sketch one or two migration paths to Umbraco or Umbraco Cloud, including risks and likely effort

• Share examples of how other public bodies, NGOs or private organisations moved away from WordPress, Sitecore, Kentico or Typo3
  
  

If you leave that discussion with a better sense of timing, risk and fit for Umbraco, it has done its job.

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