Umbraco 7 is end-of-life, when will you migrate to V12 (or not)?

Umbraco 7 is end-of-life... Help! But what does that actually mean for my website now? And what should I do?

Of course every agency advises you to migrate your site to the newest version as quickly as possible. Business is business. But there is no immediate reason to panic, because your site will keep running. Believe it or not, there are still sites running on Umbraco V4 that are doing just fine.

It is also not yet that simple which step you should take now, because Umbraco has (to be fair) set out a rather hectic version update roadmap. Umbraco 7 is now about six years old, so it is about time. But Umbraco 8 is only 3 years old and will be end-of-life at the beginning of next year, Umbraco 9 existed only very briefly and is already fully end-of-life now. In the last year we have had versions 10 and 11, and in the meantime we are at version 12. Next year version 13 will come again.

These seem like many updates and an undesirable situation, especially because a number of versions have so-called 'breaking changes'. These versions therefore cannot simply be updated automatically, and require a lot of manual work if you want to convert them to the latest version now. An 'update' or 'migration' from V7, V8, V9 to the latest Umbraco version is therefore simply a complete rebuild.

Umbraco did not take this step just like that, of course; it is all with the highest goal: security and stability. A lot has changed in recent years in the underlying technologies of Microsoft and other frameworks. For Umbraco's long-term vision it was necessary to be built on the newest of the new. So that the foundation is in order, and new versions can be rolled out that are easy to update. In short, with the newest versions you can move forward for years again!

But now back to the beginning for a moment. What should I do with my Umbraco V7 website?
We too give the advice to migrate to the latest version of Umbraco, but with common sense.

• Do you want to renew your website in the short term (1 year) anyway? Then feel free to wait a bit longer until that moment.
• Is your V8 website a simple online brochure. Then you can actually wait a very long time, but the site is probably also easy to rebuild again.
• Do you have a business-critical website with a lot of functionality? Then I would start a process as soon as possible to renew the site. A rebuild easily takes 3 months, and time flies.

If you have a V7 website, but no plans at all to renew yet? Then it might be wise to take a critical look at your site anyway. The lifespan of a website 'front end' (design and functionality) is about 4 years in order to stay up to date.

Maybe you have more questions than answers now.... Send me (melvin@zaaks.nl) an email then? Then we can talk it through for a bit.