Your Umbraco Site Has No Agency Behind It Anymore

Start with the version number. It is in the back office help panel, and it tells a new maintainer most of what they need to know about cost and risk.

What the version tells you

Umbraco 7 or 8. Both run on .NET Framework and both are past end of life, so no security patches are coming. Moving to a current version is a rebuild with a content migration. Budget for it. What an Umbraco 7 to 13 migration costs has the ranges.

Umbraco 9 through 12. These run on modern .NET. The short-term releases among them are out of support, but the path to a long-term support version is an upgrade. The work is in packages and custom code that used APIs since changed.

Umbraco 13 or 17. Long-term support releases. Umbraco 13 reaches end of life on December 14, 2026, so a site on 13 should have its move to 17 scheduled now. Umbraco 17 is supported until November 2028.

What is usually customized

The custom work drives the cost of any future change. Look for:

• Custom property editors and back office sections
• Code that runs on publish or save, such as notifications, cache clearing or pushes to another system
• Packages for forms, SEO or grids, and whether each still has a maintained version
• Member login areas
• Integrations: CRM, email marketing, search, payment
• Scheduled jobs such as imports and sitemap generation

What a new maintainer needs

1. Source code, ideally a Git repository with history. Deployed files alone are a weaker starting point.
2. A database backup. Content, document types and users all live there.
3. The media folder, or access to the blob storage account that holds it.
4. License files for Umbraco Forms, Deploy or other paid packages, and the account they were bought under.
5. Hosting and DNS access, with your organization as the account owner. For Umbraco Cloud, the project needs to be under your account.
6. A back office administrator login.
7. The deployment steps, even as rough notes.

This week

Whether or not you hire anyone, confirm four things: you have an administrator login, you know where the site is hosted and who pays for it, a recent backup of the database and media exists and you can get a copy, and the domain and DNS are registered to your organization. If the previous agency is still reachable, ask for items 1 through 7 in one written request.

The first month of a takeover

A typical first month: get the site building and running locally from source, set up a staging environment and a repeatable deployment, apply the available security patches, and deliver a written inventory of the custom work with the upgrade path and its cost. After that, content editors have someone to call and the next upgrade has a date.