From Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 18

Umbraco Upgrades and Migrations

If you're on a version of Umbraco before version 17 you should consider upgrading or migrating for security and performance. Here's how I can help.

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Not all upgrades are equal.

An upgrade is usually a more-or-less straight upgrade of your Umbraco content database. Umbraco does nearly all of the work; you might need to amend some code, but you can keep the same project and most of your code will carry on working. This is usually the case when you are moving between minor releases (e.g. 17.6.x to 17.7.x).

Templates

If you're moving to a higher version, or from a different CMS, the templates that render your content need to be updated or rewritten.

When is an upgrade not an upgrade?

However, there are times when moving between Umbraco versions requires significant technical expertise. This can be for a variety of reasons; something in the underlying .NET platform changed, or Umbraco HQ decided to rewrite parts of the application (like the recent back office change), or you've been putting the upgrade off and now it's a 10-version jump from 7 to 17.

For example, an upgrade from version 13 to version 17 can be straightforward, but if you have a lot of custom back office functionality that was built for an earlier version (dashboard, app, property editor), then it all needs rewriting from AngularJS to Web Components; other smaller changes are necessary too, because some data and functionality inevitably changes between versions.

If you're moving from an even earlier version like 7 or 8, you need to know exactly which versions to run to migrate your data (just running the latest version isn't usually enough), and you need to rewrite all of your templates and any custom code to work with the new version.

Back-end code and packages

Most websites use packages that add functionality to the base system. If you're using a different CMS, migrating to Umbraco means making sure you can replicate these, rebuilding them if necessary; if you're moving from an earlier version, you need to make sure that the packages have been udpated for your new version.

If you have a website in a different CMS (WordPress, Matrix, Sitecore, Kentico, Orchard, etc). and you want to move to Umbraco then unless you have a very small site that you're willing to recreate in Umbraco, you'll need somebody that knows how to transfer the data across.

The steps for this type of migration are complex; the data needs to be transferred out of the existing system, and code needs to be rewritten to import it into Umbraco's own format.

The templates that render the site content need to be built in Umbraco, along with any custom functionality you need, and the URL structure needs to stay the same (or redirects need to be created) to ensure your SEO rankings aren't affected; the hosting needs to be set up correctly for a .NET application, and any search functionality for the site needs to be rewritten in Umbraco.

Hosting

If you're hosting a WordPress site and want to move to Umbraco, you'll need to change your hosting to something that supports .NET (WordPress is built on PHP).

If you're currently on version 13, it is End of Life on 14th December 2026. (If you're on any previous version, it is already End of Life and unsupported).

This means version 13 will no longer receive functional or security patches unless you pay for extended long term support (XLTS), and you should definitely consider upgrading to version 17 (the current long term supported version).

There are also significant performance benefits to be had in version 17, due to improved processing and the .NET 10 platform, as well as various AI addons that are only available for version 17+, like Semantic Search.

If you need somebody to get your site onto the latest version, I have a wealth of experience in upgrading/migrating Umbraco sites from version 7 all the way up to version 18, including rebuilding custom back office components and dashboards for the new back office and migrating large sites with thousands of content nodes and media items.

Feel free to contact me or book a consultation if you think I could help you upgrade or migrate your site, or you're an Umbraco partner that needs additional resource to help with upgrades for your clients.

Data Migration

Version 7 had a different database structure to Version 8+; different versions of Umbraco run different database migrations, so you need to know which versions to run to make sure you end up with the correct data at the end of the process. Other CMSs use entirely different data structures, so you need somebody that understands data well to be able to transform it to the Umbraco format.