£8,999 sounds low. What's the catch?

There's no catch, there's a scope. It's the price for a standard upgrade, which most sites are. Because we do the work ourselves rather than routing it through layers of a larger agency, the cost reflects the job and not the overhead. If your site is genuinely complex, we'll tell you before you commit.

Will the live site go down?

No. We build and test in a parallel environment and only switch over once it's verified. This assumes we can control the target hosting; if it's locked down or third-party managed, we cover that on the call and plan the cutover accordingly.

We're a law firm and can't have client data at risk. How do you handle that?

Legal and professional-services work is a large part of what we do, and we've handled real security incident response, not just theory. Nothing experimental touches production, the live site stays isolated from the build until cutover, and we're happy to work to your data-handling requirements. We can cover specifics, including any NDA, on the first call.

How long does the upgrade take?

Around 21 days from kick-off to handover for a standard site. It's a fixed timeline rather than an open-ended project, so you can plan a content freeze, brief your team and arrange sign-off knowing when it will land.

What happens to our content, media and search rankings?

Content and media migrate as part of the upgrade, and we keep your URL structure intact so existing links and rankings hold. Where anything has to move, we put redirects in place so nothing breaks. Protecting your SEO through the upgrade is part of the job, not an extra we bolt on afterwards.

Will our integrations and custom code still work?

Standard functionality carries across. Custom code and third-party integrations are exactly what we check before quoting, because the move from .NET 8 to .NET 10 and the newer Umbraco APIs can mean some rework. If yours needs it, it's in the quote up front, not a surprise mid-project.

Do our content editors need retraining?

The V17 back office is more modern and block-based, but still familiar. Most editors are comfortable quickly. Handover notes and a walkthrough for the team are included, so nobody is left puzzling over an unfamiliar screen on the first Monday after go-live.

We're on Umbraco Cloud. Does that change anything?

We work across both Umbraco Cloud and self-hosted sites. Cloud has its own upgrade and deployment flow, and includes Umbraco Deploy for moving content and schema, which we know well. The fixed price still applies to a standard Cloud upgrade. We'll confirm the specifics of your environment on the first call.

What if we can't upgrade before December 2026?

Umbraco sells Extended Long-Term Support for V13, which buys 6, 12 or 24 more months of security patches past the December 2026 deadline. It's a paid bridge rather than a fix - the upgrade still has to happen - but it takes the pressure off if you genuinely can't move in time. We'd rather help you plan a proper upgrade with XLTS in place than rush a bad one to beat a date.

How do payments work?

Split in two: 50% on sign-off to begin, and the remaining 50% once the upgrade is complete and handed over to you. We invoice on handover rather than go-live, since go-live can sit waiting on internal sign-off or a content freeze for weeks, and a finished piece of work shouldn't be held hostage to that.

Umbraco 13 to 17 Upgrade: Fixed Price £8,999 + VAT

A rushed Umbraco upgrade is worse than a late one.

Umbraco 13 support ends 14 December 2026. We move you to 17 for a fixed £8,999 + VAT, in around 21 days, with no downtime.

Simon Steed 14th August 2026 · 4 min read · Updated 2nd September 2026

V13 loses its security support on 14 December 2026, so it does have to move. But an upgrade done in a hurry - lost content, a payment integration still pointing at the old endpoint, editors locked out of a back office they no longer recognise - costs far more to unpick than the deadline ever saved.

We handle these upgrades end to end. Fixed price, no downtime, and you deal directly with the people doing the work rather than an account manager relaying messages to a team you never meet.

What actually goes wrong in a bad upgrade

Most upgrade horror stories have nothing to do with the version jump itself. They're about the things around it. A property editor that silently stops saving. A CRM feed that still writes to the old field names. A media library that migrates halfway and leaves broken links across the site. A back office your team opens on Monday and simply cannot use.

The upgrade "worked", in the narrow sense that the site now reports V17. But the business running on it is firefighting, and every fix after go-live is more expensive and more visible than it would have been before. On a legal or professional-services site, that isn't an inconvenience. It's client work interrupted and, depending on what broke, a compliance question you now have to answer.

Getting onto a supported version is the easy half. Getting there without breaking the things your business actually relies on is the half worth paying for.

How we keep an upgrade boring

Boring is the goal. A good upgrade is one nobody outside the project notices, because the live site never wobbled and the team's Monday looked like every other Monday.

We build and test V17 against a copy of your live environment, work through the breaking changes and package updates there, and only cut over once everything has been verified. Your current site stays up throughout. Nothing experimental touches production.

You deal with us directly for the whole thing. No account manager, no rotating pool of contractors, no offshore handoff where context gets lost between time zones. We've worked on every version of Umbraco since v4 and spent decades on the wider Microsoft stack, which mostly means we've already met the thing that's about to go wrong with your particular site.

What we look at before we give you a price

The honest answer to "how much is an upgrade" is "it depends", and anyone who quotes you a flat number before looking is guessing. What it depends on is short and specific, so the free call is mostly us checking four things:

Custom back-office work. Bespoke property editors, dashboards or content apps are where V17 can need real rebuilding rather than a straight migration.
Third-party integrations. A CRM, payment gateway or data feed may need reworking or remapping against the new APIs.
Hosting access. The no-downtime, parallel cutover assumes we can control the target environment. If hosting is locked down or managed by a third party, we plan around that.
Content and media volume. Most sites are fine; the outliers are worth knowing about up front.

If your site is standard, you get the fixed price below. If it isn't, we tell you exactly why and what the number is before you commit, not after.

Two routes to V17, and we pick the right one

Umbraco itself describes two sensible ways to move from V13 to V17. Most standard sites take the first, and that's what the fixed price covers.

Route 1: upgrade in place. We upgrade your existing solution and run the migrations against it. The right call for healthy, well-understood sites, and the one behind the fixed price.

Route 2: a fresh V17 build. We stand up a clean V17 solution and move your content and structure across in a controlled way with Umbraco Deploy. Better for legacy-heavy sites carrying real technical debt, and scoped separately. If yours is one of those, we say so on the call rather than forcing it into a price that doesn't fit.

One thing worth knowing about this particular jump: Umbraco rebuilt the back office in V14, with a new architecture and extension model. Standard content and templates migrate cleanly, but any bespoke property editors, dashboards or back-office extensions have to be rebuilt for the new model. That's the single biggest thing we check before quoting.

The version you're moving to, not just off

V13's security support ends on 14 December 2026. Its .NET 8 runtime reaches end of life a month earlier. After those dates, anything found in the CMS or the framework it sits on stays unpatched on your live site.

V17 is a long-term support release on .NET 10, supported into 2028, with a modern block-based editing experience. Moving now, calmly, on a fixed price, is a straightforward decision. Moving in a panic next autumn, competing for scarce developer time, is not.

The full offer, the honest FAQ and the booking link are below.

Umbraco 13 to 17, done properly.

We move you to Umbraco 17 LTS without breaking the things your business relies on: fixed price, fixed timescale, and no downtime at cutover. The site you rely on stays live while we build and verify the new one alongside it. Umbraco 13 security support ends 14 December 2026. We run a small number of upgrades in parallel, and the queue fills as the deadline approaches. The earlier you book, the more choice you have over timing.