Should I upgrade to Umbraco 8?

This is the million-dollar question for many businesses that use older versions of the Umbraco CMS.  There are substantial business benefits to Umbraco 8: specifically around improvements to editing features for Multilingual sites; and improvements in site speed introduced by Nucache.  And of course Umbraco 8 has a longer shelf life - the retirement of Umbraco has been announced, so while Umbraco 7 continues to be patched for security reasons it isn’t benefiting from future product developments.

However, there is a cost to upgrading a site to Umbraco 8.  Umbraco 8 is a substantial breaking change (hence the major version number change) and all of the custom code in an Umbraco 7 site, including Views, Partial Views and Controllers will require changes to make them compatible with Umbraco 8.

Also, Umbraco 8 isn’t production-ready for some use cases, including those with a dependency on Umbraco Courier, Tea Commerce, and Stacked Content.

We feel that Umbraco 8 is definitely ready for Production use, however, YMMV so always think carefully before embarking on a Umbraco upgrade.

We have been doing Umbraco upgrades for over 10 years, we have a well-rehearsed plan that can reduce the cost and the risk of the upgrade process.  Find out more about our Fixed Price Upgrades.