If you manage an Umbraco website, you need to know what keeps it reliable, what support should cover and when to plan an upgrade.
In 2026, those questions are particularly relevant for organisations running Umbraco 13, which reaches its standard end-of-life date in December.
Here are the questions we would encourage any website owner to ask their support partner.
What should Umbraco maintenance include?
An Umbraco maintenance and support arrangement should explain how your website will be monitored, updated, supported and recovered if something goes wrong.
Depending on your platform and agreement, that may include:
- CMS and package updates.
- Security advisory reviews and patching.
- Error monitoring and investigation.
- Backup management and recovery testing.
- Checks on important forms, transactions and integrations.
- Performance reviews.
- Technical support for your team.
- Planning for future upgrades.
The agreement should identify who owns each responsibility, how frequently planned work happens and how urgent issues are handled.
It should also make clear which activities require a separate budget.
What is the difference between hosting and maintenance?
Hosting provides the environment in which your website runs. Maintenance looks after the application running within it.
A hosting service may keep the server available while a website still has broken forms, failing integrations or problems with custom functionality.
Both need an owner. Your agreement should explain where hosting responsibilities end and application support begins, including whether your Umbraco partner investigates problems that cross that boundary.
Do we still need maintenance if we use Umbraco Cloud?
You still need someone responsible for the website itself.
Umbraco Cloud automates parts of platform upkeep, including applicable patch releases. That reduces some maintenance work, but your implementation may also contain custom code, third-party packages and integrations that need attention. An Umbraco platform development team can help assess those dependencies alongside the upgrade options available for major and minor releases.
Cloud hosting should form part of your maintenance plan, with clear responsibility for testing customer journeys, investigating application errors and planning larger changes.
How much does Umbraco maintenance cost?
There is no single useful price without understanding the website and the level of support required.
The main factors include:
- Platform complexity: the number of sites, integrations, custom features and environments.
- Current condition: whether the website is stable or needs remedial work.
- Support coverage: business-hours support or wider availability.
- Response commitments: how quickly different types of incident need attention.
- Planned work: whether the agreement includes performance improvements and ongoing development.
- Upgrade requirements: which version you run and what work is approaching.
A clear proposal should separate recurring support fees, initial stabilisation work, hosting and licences, and any separately scoped upgrades.
That makes it easier to understand what you are paying for and compare proposals fairly.
Are Umbraco upgrades included in a maintenance contract?
They can be, but you should check the scope.
Routine patches and larger version upgrades involve different amounts of assessment, development and testing. A contract may include smaller updates while treating major upgrades as separately planned projects.
Ask your partner to explain which updates are included, how additional work is estimated and how far ahead they review support deadlines. A good Umbraco maintenance plan should make that upgrade work visible early enough for you to budget for it.
An upgrade should appear on the roadmap early enough for you to make a considered budget decision.
Do we need to upgrade Umbraco 13 in 2026?
You should have a plan for its end of life on 14 December 2026.
Umbraco 13 is in its security-only phase. After that deadline, standard security updates end. Umbraco offers Extended Long-Term Support, or XLTS, for organisations that need additional time to complete an upgrade or migration.
Your website will not automatically stop working on that date. The change concerns the support available for the software.
The appropriate next step is to assess your implementation, agree a supported destination and schedule the work. If you need extended support, establish its coverage and terms before relying on it.
Which Umbraco version should we upgrade to?
As of September 2026, Umbraco 17 is the current long-term support release, with end of life scheduled for 27 November 2028. Umbraco 18 is a standard-term release with a shorter support window.
The right destination depends on package compatibility, custom functionality, hosting and your future development plans.
Your partner should explain the recommendation in terms of support lifetime, implementation effort and business needs.
Can we upgrade without rebuilding the website?
Often, an existing implementation can be upgraded. A full rebuild should follow an assessment of the platform and your requirements.
The work depends on your starting version, custom code, packages and the changes between releases. Umbraco describes both upgrading an existing solution and moving to a fresh implementation as routes from version 13 to 17.
Ask for a recommendation that explains what can be retained, what needs adapting and why.
A support deadline alone does not establish that the entire website needs redesigning.
Can another agency take over our Umbraco website?
Yes, subject to reviewing the implementation and securing the necessary access and rights.
A handover typically requires access to the source code, hosting, database, deployment process and relevant services. Documentation, licence information and a record of known issues help the incoming team understand the platform.
The new partner should review the website before committing to support arrangements. That may reveal work needed to make releases safer, improve recovery or resolve existing faults.
Taking over support can be an opportunity to create a clearer picture of the platform and its priorities.
Why is our Umbraco website slow?
Performance needs investigation. The CMS name alone does not explain the cause.
Possible contributors include large media files, third-party scripts, application code, database queries, caching, hosting resources and slow external services.
A useful review measures the affected pages and journeys, identifies where time is being spent and prioritises changes by their impact.
For a customer, a slow search or booking step can matter more than a homepage performance score.
What should an Umbraco support agreement say about response times?
It should define the support hours, incident priorities, response targets and communication process.
It should also distinguish between acknowledging a problem, investigating it and restoring the service. These are separate milestones.
A failed purchase journey and a minor display issue should have different priorities. Agree those definitions before an incident, along with the route for contacting the right people.
How do we know whether our maintenance partner is doing a good job?
Look for evidence that the platform is becoming more dependable and easier to manage.
Useful signs include fewer recurring incidents, clear explanations of completed work, predictable releases and early notice of approaching decisions.
You should be able to ask what needs attention, why it matters and what happens next - and receive an understandable answer.
At Absurd, we combine Umbraco support with ongoing technical ownership and improvements to performance and user experience. We help teams understand the platform they have, resolve underlying problems and plan its next stage.