Why regular Umbraco upgrades matter for your website

An Umbraco website that's a few versions behind often runs just fine, until you want it to do something new. Upgrading regularly keeps your site secure, stable, and ready to grow. In this post, you'll learn about the different types of upgrades, how often to upgrade, and how to keep the costs predictable.

A marketing manager wants to connect a new request form to the CRM so leads go straight to sales. The developer opens the code and finds the site is several major Umbraco versions behind. Before anyone can build the form, the entire foundation has to be updated. A job that should take a few days turns into a project that takes weeks, with a budget nobody had set aside for it.

What does an Umbraco upgrade get you?

If you put off upgrades, you usually notice at the worst possible moment. A new integration won't work with the old version, a security vulnerability has only been fixed in newer releases, or a developer first has to spend days figuring out how outdated code fits together. The longer you wait, the bigger the jump and the harder it is to estimate the cost up front.

Umbraco keeps developing its CMS. An upgrade lets you benefit from that work:

• Security: Umbraco patches known vulnerabilities.
• Stability: Umbraco fixes bugs, so your site and the CMS run more reliably.
• New features: your editors get new capabilities and a CMS that's more pleasant to work with.
• Future-proofing: you stay compatible with new versions of .NET, current regulations, and modern technology, so integrations and new features remain possible.

Three types of Umbraco upgrades

An Umbraco version number has three parts. Each one stands for a different type of upgrade, and each has a different impact on your website.

Major upgrade

The first number is the major version. In a major upgrade, Umbraco can change or remove existing functionality. With a solid analysis up front, even a major upgrade is easy to estimate and carry out.

Minor upgrade

The middle number is the minor version. Changes in a minor upgrade can affect your code, but the impact is usually limited and fairly easy to resolve.

Patch

The last number is the patch. A patch fixes bugs or security vulnerabilities and generally doesn't break anything. We still always test a patch in a test and acceptance environment before it goes live.

How often should you upgrade Umbraco?

Many organizations only plan an upgrade when a big project is coming up. As a result, versions pile up and every upgrade becomes a separate project with its own budget and timeline. Small, regular steps cost less and are much easier to manage.

That's why we work on a fixed schedule at True People. Every update goes through a DTAP pipeline, a standard setup with separate development, test, acceptance, and production environments, so no change ever goes live untested. We always roll out critical patches right away across all environments. You can pay for that as you go or, to avoid surprise costs, for a fixed monthly fee. That fixed fee also covers one minor upgrade per year.

As an Umbraco Gold Partner, we follow every Umbraco release closely. A site that hasn't been updated in years often needs an afternoon of digging through the code first, to see which third-party packages are still supported and which ones need replacing, before anyone can give you an honest estimate. A regular upgrade schedule saves you that detective work and keeps every step small.

Which Umbraco version should you choose?

A site running on an unsupported version no longer receives security updates. You can't see that risk from the outside until something goes wrong, so it's smart to know how long your version will still be supported.

Umbraco releases a new major version roughly every six months. Some of these are LTS versions, short for long-term support: versions that are supported for three years, first with bug fixes and then with security updates. Umbraco 13 and Umbraco 17 are the most recent LTS versions. The releases in between have a shorter support window.

If your site runs on a version that's nearing end of life, the point at which a version stops receiving updates, plan your move well before that date. Umbraco 13 End of Life: time for Umbraco 17 explains what the move involves. To see what the new version offers, read What's new in Umbraco 17?