No. Our upgrades are designed for no downtime at cutover. The upgraded site is built and tested in a separate environment while your current site carries on serving visitors as normal. Nothing changes for your customers until the new version has been tested against your real content and integrations, and the switch itself is done without taking the site offline. Your team keeps editing content until an agreed point close to cutover, so there is no lengthy content freeze either. If your current agency has told you an upgrade means a weekend of maintenance pages, that is a choice about how they work, not a fact about Umbraco. Done properly, your visitors never know the upgrade happened.
This question usually comes from someone who has lived through a bad cutover: the maintenance page that stayed up all weekend, the missing content on Monday, the contact form that quietly stopped working. None of that is inherent to upgrading Umbraco. It is what happens when the upgrade is done in place, on the live site, under time pressure.
We never upgrade a live site in place. The upgraded version is built in its own environment while your existing site keeps running untouched. That separation buys three things: unlimited time to test without risk, a like-for-like comparison against the live site page by page, and a cutover that is a controlled switch rather than a leap of faith. Because the new site is proven before it goes anywhere near your visitors, the switch itself involves no downtime.
Content keeps flowing. Your editors work normally through almost all of the project. Close to cutover we agree a short window where changes are synchronised into the new environment, so nothing published during the upgrade is lost. This is a coordination detail most horror stories get wrong, and it costs nothing to get right if it is planned from day one.
Every upgrade includes 30 days of cover after go live. If anything surfaces in live use, from a styling quirk to an integration edge case, fixing it is part of the job, not a new invoice. And because the old environment is retained, there is always a way back while any issue is investigated, though in practice careful testing means the way back stays unused.
The full process, timeline and £8,999 plus VAT fixed price for Umbraco 13 to 17 are on our migrations and upgrades page. If a previous upgrade experience has made you cautious, we understand why, and we are happy to walk you through exactly how the cutover works before you commit to anything.
Tell us what you're working on and we'll come back within one working day.
An Umbraco Silver Partner agency in Llandudno, North Wales and the Isle of Man, building and looking after Umbraco and .NET websites for businesses and agencies across the UK and beyond. Simon Antony is a brand of Simplepage Ltd.
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF