Running an out of support Umbraco version, or watching the 13 deadline approach? The risk grows quietly. Here is the honest picture and the fixed price way out.
You found out in one of the usual ways. A cyber insurance questionnaire asked whether all your software is vendor-supported, and you hesitated. A prospective customer's due diligence checklist wanted your CMS version in writing. A developer mentioned it in passing, months ago, and the sentence has been sitting in the back of your mind ever since. Or you simply read that Umbraco 13 security support ends on 14 December 2026, did the arithmetic on your own site, and felt the small cold drop of a deadline you did not choose.
The uncomfortable part is not the fact itself. It is that nothing visible is wrong. The website works. Customers use it. Nothing about an out-of-support CMS announces itself; the site on the day after the deadline looks identical to the site on the day before. So the upgrade slips down the agenda, because it is competing with things that are actually on fire, and a risk with no symptoms loses that argument every quarter.
Meanwhile you carry it around. Every security headline lands slightly differently now: was that our platform? Every renewal of the insurance, every big customer's procurement round, every audit, you brace slightly, hoping nobody asks the version question. If you have raised it internally, you have probably discovered how hard it is to make a silent risk feel urgent to people who can only see the working website. And if a quote for the upgrade has already been gathered, it may have made things worse: open-ended hours against an unknown codebase, a number that reads like a guess because it is one.
So the situation persists in the most human way possible: everyone responsible knows, nobody is lying, and the thing still is not done. The deadline does not care. Every newly discovered vulnerability in an unsupported version stays open forever, and the pile only grows in one direction. What you are feeling is reasonable. It is the correct response to holding a liability that compounds quietly while looking, to everyone else, like a website that works fine.
The fix is a planned upgrade, and the machinery for it is deliberately unexciting. For Umbraco 13 sites, we sell it as a fixed price: £8,999 plus VAT for the move to Umbraco 17, around 21 days end to end, paid 50/50, with 30 days of cover after go live. Fixed matters here, because the classic reason this project stalls is hourly quotes that transfer all the uncertainty to you. We can hold the price because we have taken Umbraco sites through every major version since v4 in 2011; the surprises that inflate other people's invoices are line items we already planned for. The full offer is on our migrations and upgrades page.
The project will not interrupt the working site that your colleagues can see, which helps the internal argument too. The upgraded site is built and tested in its own environment, your editors keep publishing throughout, and the cutover happens with no downtime; our FAQ answers on whether the site goes down and how long an upgrade really takes walk through the mechanics. If your site is older than version 13, or carries heavy customisation, we scope that honestly instead of forcing it into a price that does not fit, and if you want an evidence-based view of what your site actually needs first, our audit service produces exactly that, whichever way it points.
Two things are worth doing regardless of who you hire. First, put a date in the diary well before December 2026: the whole industry shares this deadline, capacity will tighten as it approaches, and planned work is always cheaper and calmer than remediation done under pressure. Second, make the risk legible to the people who hold the budget. The sentence that works is not technical: after 14 December 2026, security holes found in our website's platform will never be fixed, and our insurer and our biggest customers both ask about this. That sentence, plus a fixed number and a 21 day timeline, usually ends the stalemate; the deeper background is in what happens when Umbraco 13 goes out of support.
When you are ready to make it real, send us your site address and current version. You will get back a firm number, a realistic timeline, and the particular relief of a compounding risk converted into a scheduled project.
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