A website should help your team move things forward. When publishing becomes cumbersome, development costs are difficult to predict, or the platform no longer fits your plans, it may be time to reconsider your CMS.
For organisations exploring a move from Kentico, Umbraco is an option worth assessing. Its open-source foundation and flexible approach to content management can suit businesses that want more control over how their website is built and maintained.
A successful migration needs clear decisions about content, functionality and the way your team will work. Those decisions should start well before development.
Start with the Kentico version and architecture
The first step is understanding exactly what you have. An older Kentico Portal Engine website, a Kentico Xperience 13 implementation and a site running Xperience by Kentico present different migration challenges. Kentico describes Xperience by Kentico as a new product with important differences from its legacy platforms. Your starting version and architecture therefore belong at the centre of the assessment. Read Kentico’s upgrade overview.
Umbraco’s appeal starts with choice. The core CMS is free and open source, with paid hosting and additional products available depending on your requirements. This gives you room to assemble a solution around the capabilities your organisation needs. See Umbraco’s products and pricing.
That flexibility still needs a realistic business case. Compare the full cost of running your website over several years: implementation, hosting, support, integrations, add-ons, training and ongoing upgrades. Lower CMS licensing costs can be valuable, but the overall saving depends on what you build and how you maintain it.
Audit the website and the work it supports
Start the project with an audit of the existing website. Catalogue its content, templates, media, forms, languages, integrations and custom functionality. Speak to the people who publish content and those who handle the enquiries or transactions it generates. A feature that looks minor on the website may support an essential internal process.
Pay particular attention to marketing functionality. Kentico Xperience 13 includes capabilities such as contact management, personalisation, email marketing and marketing automation, subject to the implementation and licence. Establish which of these your team actually uses and how each will work after migration. Read Kentico’s marketing documentation.
Umbraco offers additional products for areas including forms, personalisation, commerce and approval workflows. Assess these alongside your existing business systems, checking requirements individually rather than assuming a direct replacement. Each retained capability needs a destination, an implementation plan and someone responsible for testing it. Explore Umbraco’s product range.
The content audit is also an opportunity to reduce unnecessary work. Identify pages that remain useful, pages that need updating and content that can be consolidated or retired. Use traffic, search performance, business value and content ownership to guide those decisions. Some low-traffic pages still serve an essential purpose.
Design the editing experience
Once you know what is moving, design how it will be managed. Umbraco uses Document Types to define content structures and fields, with templates controlling how that content appears. This gives the implementation team an opportunity to create a clearer editing experience. See Umbraco’s content structure guide.
For example, a case study might have dedicated fields for the client, sector, challenge, results and related services. That structure can help editors maintain consistency and make content easier to reuse. Test representative pages with the people who will maintain them before committing to the full build.
Plan and test the migration
The migration itself needs explicit mapping between the two systems. Content fields, images, downloads, internal links, language versions and relationships all need to arrive in the right place. Plan to adapt or rebuild CMS-dependent templates, widgets and integrations. Kentico’s own migration tool targets Xperience by Kentico; it should not be mistaken for a Kentico-to-Umbraco converter. View the Kentico Migration Tool.
Run a trial migration early. Include difficult examples: a page with several content components, a translated article, a download-heavy resource and a form connected to another system. Checking these examples exposes gaps before they affect the entire website. Make the process repeatable so content changes made during development can be included at launch.
Protect search visibility
Search visibility deserves its own workstream. Preserve existing URLs where practical. Where addresses change, map each old URL to the most relevant new destination and implement permanent redirects. Update internal links, check canonical URLs and submit the new sitemap. Google recommends avoiding irrelevant redirects and warns that rankings can fluctuate while changed URLs are recrawled and reindexed. Read Google’s site migration guidance.
Prepare for launch
Before launch, test complete journeys. Submit an enquiry and confirm it reaches the right team. Check search, downloads, account access, mobile layouts, accessibility and analytics. Give editors time to practise publishing, previewing and updating real content.
Agree how final content changes will be captured, who approves launch and how the previous site could be restored if necessary. After launch, monitor errors, search visibility, enquiries and integration failures, with named people available to resolve issues.
Migrating from Kentico to Umbraco can create a website that is easier to manage and better suited to your organisation’s plans. The strongest starting point is a clear assessment of what your current website does, what your team needs and what success should look like. Build the migration around those answers.