Umbraco 7 → 13 Migration

A professional services firm had been running Umbraco 7 on .NET Framework 4.7 for eight years. End-of-life support and a growing backlog of security patches made migration unavoidable — but the site had complex content structures built up over a decade.

The challenge

No migration path exists between Umbraco 7 and 13 — it’s a rebuild. The client had 3,200 pages of live content, custom document types with nested complex editors, and a bespoke membership section that needed to survive intact.

Approach

The migration was staged. First, a content audit mapped every document type and identified what could be simplified in the new schema. The Umbraco 13 build ran in parallel on .NET 8, with a custom migration script extracting content from the old SQL database and importing it via the Content Service API.

The front-end was rebuilt with modern Razor views and a clean component library, replacing the original Bootstrap 3 templates. The membership section was re-implemented using Umbraco Members with custom profile fields.

Outcome

• 3,200 pages migrated with zero content loss
• Page load time reduced by 60% on .NET 8 vs the old .NET Framework host
• Client now self-managing content updates they previously needed developer assistance for