Your current CMS is holding your team back, but the thought of moving everything without breaking something keeps you up at night. We handle migrations properly, not just quickly.
Some of you inherited this CMS from someone who left. Some of you chose it years ago when the business looked different. Either way, you're the one who fields the ticket when an editor can't publish, and the one who has to justify the rebuild. We plan every migration around your content, your integrations and your team's day-to-day workflow, not just the platform swap. Nothing goes live until we've tested it against your actual site, not a generic checklist.
Whether you're moving off another content management system entirely or outgrowing your current CMS platform, our Umbraco migration services all start the same way: scope your whole web estate properly before quoting anything. The point of moving isn't a new coat of paint, it's a better day-to-day user experience for whoever's actually publishing.
Our approach to successful projects
Before we touch a line of code, we go through your current site properly: every page, every content type, every integration that quietly keeps things running. For a migration, this stage matters more than most, because we need to know exactly what "moving house" involves before we start packing boxes. We ask about the content nobody remembers is there, the plugin holding a key workflow together, and the traffic and ranking data for the pages you can't afford to lose. We also talk to whoever's actually logging into the CMS day to day, not just whoever's approving the budget, because they're the ones who'll notice if something's missing on the other side. This is also where we handle any overdue data cleanup, tidying legacy document types, unused content models and duplicate content before it follows you into the new build.
Once we know what you've got, we work out what actually needs to move, what needs rebuilding properly this time, and what's been quietly broken for years and nobody's mentioned. We map your existing database and content structure against Umbraco's, flag anything that won't transfer cleanly (older or more unusual platforms often have a few), and plan your URL structure and redirects before a single page moves. You get a clear picture of scope and cost at this stage, not a moving target that grows once we're halfway through.
If you're moving off an old platform entirely, this is also where we plan which version of Umbraco you land on. We'll usually recommend a current Long-Term Support release, Umbraco 13 or Umbraco 14, rather than an older line, so you're not straight back into a major version upgrade a year later. For sites already limping along on something like Umbraco 7, Umbraco 8 or Umbraco 12, the migration path often looks less like a fresh start and more like finally following Umbraco's own upgrade guides properly, something that's usually been quietly avoided for years. We map your existing database schema against Umbraco's structure at this stage too, since it's the surest way to catch anything that won't translate cleanly, and we'll check whether any third-party packages you rely on have an Umbraco equivalent before we commit to a plan. Umbraco itself runs on Microsoft technology under the hood, which is worth knowing if your IT team wants reassurance about what they're inheriting.
This is where the migration actually happens: content types get built, your data gets moved across using proper migration tooling rather than copy and paste, and integrations get reconnected and tested one by one. Everything runs on a staging environment first, checked against your live site page by page, so nothing goes public until it matches or improves on what you had. Large or complex migrations get done in a sequence that keeps your team working throughout, rather than one disruptive cutover that stops everyone in their tracks.
We typically use tools like Umbraco Deploy and uSync Migrations to move content and structure across accurately rather than rebuilding it by hand, which protects data integrity throughout the process. More complex property types, nested content and block grid editor layouts, and anything held together with custom code, get individual attention rather than a generic export, because these are usually where accuracy gets lost fastest.
A migration that only Gecko understands hasn't actually solved your problem. Before launch, we walk your team through the new backoffice, document how your specific content types and workflows work, and make sure whoever's editing the site day to day feels at home in it, not like they've been handed someone else's system. If you're the only person who currently understands your website, this is the stage that stops being true.
Once you're live, we keep an eye on rankings, redirects and site performance in the weeks that follow, because that's when migration issues actually surface, not on launch day itself. From there, the site is properly yours: your content, your structure, your team running it. If you'd like us to keep looking after it, our support team is on hand for that too, but there's no obligation either way.
We move your existing content, media and structured data into Umbraco using proper migration tooling, not manual copy and paste, which is where accuracy (and your sanity) tends to get lost. Every content type gets mapped individually rather than forced into a generic template, so nuanced structures like nested articles, product listings or multi-author content carry across intact.
For larger sites, this includes a full content audit first, so we're migrating what's actually being used, not dragging years of dead pages into your new build. You get a like-for-like content set at the end, built properly for how Umbraco actually works, not a rough approximation of your old site. This is proper content management, migrated with care, not just an export and import between two different systems.
Every URL on your existing site gets mapped to its new address before launch, and every redirect goes live the moment the new site does, not days later once someone remembers. This is the single biggest factor in whether a migration protects or damages your search rankings, so we treat it as a dedicated piece of work, not a box to tick at the end. We also review your existing URL structure for anything worth improving along the way, broken patterns, duplicate paths, inconsistent naming, since a migration is the natural point to fix these without any extra disruption.
Umbraco also has its own redirect management system built into the backoffice, which we set up to track any 404s automatically after launch, so gaps get caught early rather than discovered by a drop in search engine rankings weeks later. Protecting your SEO rankings is the whole point of this stage, not a side effect of it.
Umbraco's content types work differently to most other platforms, so this isn't a lift-and-shift job. We rebuild your page templates, components and content structures properly within Umbraco's framework, keeping the parts of your site that work well and quietly improving the parts that don't. If your old CMS forced awkward workarounds, hardcoded sections, duplicated templates for near-identical pages, this is where we design them out, so your team gets a system that matches how they actually want to publish, not one they have to work around.
This is also where we handle any custom component development your site relies on, and check whether current project customizations still make sense or whether Umbraco's own tools now cover them better. We'll always flag which of your old platform's supported features carry across as standard, and which need bespoke work to recreate. Template rebuilds are also a natural point to tidy up grid layout inconsistencies or make small UI/UX updates, without turning the migration into a full redesign nobody asked for.
CRMs, booking systems, marketing platforms, analytics, whatever currently connects to your site gets mapped, reconnected and tested individually during the migration, not bundled in as an afterthought. We check each integration against your live site's behaviour before we consider it done, because a form that submits but doesn't sync to your CRM is a problem you won't notice until a lead goes missing.
If an integration was held together with an outdated plugin on your old platform, we'll flag a cleaner way to do it in Umbraco rather than recreating the same fragility.
Whether that's a CRM connection like Dynamics 365, a marketing platform talking to your site through API calls, or a handful of smaller third-party tools nobody remembers signing up for, each one gets checked individually rather than assumed to still work.
Nothing goes live without being tested against your actual site first, page by page, form by form, integration by integration, on a staging environment built specifically for this migration. We check content accuracy, redirect behaviour, page speed, responsive layouts and every integration point before we even talk about a launch date. For larger or more complex sites, we'll run this in phases, so you can see and approve progress along the way rather than waiting for one big reveal that might not match what you expected.
We also test in whatever hosting environment you'll actually be running on, whether that's Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS or somewhere else entirely, since performance can vary between them. Testing covers performance improvements too, not just whether pages load, checking against known security threats and confirming the site's ready to receive Umbraco's regular security updates and patches from day one.
Once you're live, we walk your team through the new backoffice properly, not a rushed screen-share, and leave you with documentation specific to how your content types and workflows actually function. We monitor the site closely in the weeks after launch, since that's typically when redirect gaps or ranking movements show up, and we're on hand to fix anything that surfaces.
If you'd like ongoing support after that, we can talk through what that looks like, but there's no pressure to commit to anything beyond the migration itself.
If your site uses Umbraco Forms for enquiries or bookings, we'll walk through how that works for your back-office users specifically, not just the general backoffice tour.
We move your existing content, media and structured data into Umbraco using proper migration tooling, not manual copy and paste, which is where accuracy (and your sanity) tends to get lost. Every content type gets mapped individually rather than forced into a generic template, so nuanced structures like nested articles, product listings or multi-author content carry across intact.
For larger sites, this includes a full content audit first, so we're migrating what's actually being used, not dragging years of dead pages into your new build. You get a like-for-like content set at the end, built properly for how Umbraco actually works, not a rough approximation of your old site. This is proper content management, migrated with care, not just an export and import between two different systems.
Every URL on your existing site gets mapped to its new address before launch, and every redirect goes live the moment the new site does, not days later once someone remembers. This is the single biggest factor in whether a migration protects or damages your search rankings, so we treat it as a dedicated piece of work, not a box to tick at the end. We also review your existing URL structure for anything worth improving along the way, broken patterns, duplicate paths, inconsistent naming, since a migration is the natural point to fix these without any extra disruption.
Umbraco also has its own redirect management system built into the backoffice, which we set up to track any 404s automatically after launch, so gaps get caught early rather than discovered by a drop in search engine rankings weeks later. Protecting your SEO rankings is the whole point of this stage, not a side effect of it.
Umbraco's content types work differently to most other platforms, so this isn't a lift-and-shift job. We rebuild your page templates, components and content structures properly within Umbraco's framework, keeping the parts of your site that work well and quietly improving the parts that don't. If your old CMS forced awkward workarounds, hardcoded sections, duplicated templates for near-identical pages, this is where we design them out, so your team gets a system that matches how they actually want to publish, not one they have to work around.
This is also where we handle any custom component development your site relies on, and check whether current project customizations still make sense or whether Umbraco's own tools now cover them better. We'll always flag which of your old platform's supported features carry across as standard, and which need bespoke work to recreate. Template rebuilds are also a natural point to tidy up grid layout inconsistencies or make small UI/UX updates, without turning the migration into a full redesign nobody asked for.
CRMs, booking systems, marketing platforms, analytics, whatever currently connects to your site gets mapped, reconnected and tested individually during the migration, not bundled in as an afterthought. We check each integration against your live site's behaviour before we consider it done, because a form that submits but doesn't sync to your CRM is a problem you won't notice until a lead goes missing.
If an integration was held together with an outdated plugin on your old platform, we'll flag a cleaner way to do it in Umbraco rather than recreating the same fragility.
Whether that's a CRM connection like Dynamics 365, a marketing platform talking to your site through API calls, or a handful of smaller third-party tools nobody remembers signing up for, each one gets checked individually rather than assumed to still work.
Nothing goes live without being tested against your actual site first, page by page, form by form, integration by integration, on a staging environment built specifically for this migration. We check content accuracy, redirect behaviour, page speed, responsive layouts and every integration point before we even talk about a launch date. For larger or more complex sites, we'll run this in phases, so you can see and approve progress along the way rather than waiting for one big reveal that might not match what you expected.
We also test in whatever hosting environment you'll actually be running on, whether that's Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS or somewhere else entirely, since performance can vary between them. Testing covers performance improvements too, not just whether pages load, checking against known security threats and confirming the site's ready to receive Umbraco's regular security updates and patches from day one.
Once you're live, we walk your team through the new backoffice properly, not a rushed screen-share, and leave you with documentation specific to how your content types and workflows actually function. We monitor the site closely in the weeks after launch, since that's typically when redirect gaps or ranking movements show up, and we're on hand to fix anything that surfaces.
If you'd like ongoing support after that, we can talk through what that looks like, but there's no pressure to commit to anything beyond the migration itself.
If your site uses Umbraco Forms for enquiries or bookings, we'll walk through how that works for your back-office users specifically, not just the general backoffice tour.
John Logan, Full Stack Developer at Gecko
[PLACEHOLDER — no confirmed Umbraco migration case study currently available. Paragraph, metric and case study name below are illustrative only and must not be published as-is.]
When [CLIENT NAME] came to us stuck on a platform their marketing team had outgrown years earlier, we migrated their entire site, content, integrations and all, into Umbraco without a gap in service or a dip in search visibility. The result was a site their team could finally run themselves, built around how they actually work rather than how the old system forced them to.
No, and it's a common mix-up. An upgrade moves an existing Umbraco site from one version to a newer one, largely a technical process handled through Umbraco's own release tooling. A migration is moving your site onto Umbraco from a different platform altogether, WordPress, Sitecore, a bespoke system, whatever you're currently on. The work involved is different in scale: an upgrade deals mainly with Umbraco's own database and code changes, while a migration means rebuilding content types, mapping your existing content and reconnecting integrations from scratch within a new system. Umbraco CMS treats this distinction deliberately, with its own dedicated upgrade guides for moving through supported major version upgrades on the same platform. For older or heavily customised platforms, a migration is really a legacy modernisation project as much as a straight move from one system to another.
It depends entirely on the size and complexity of your current site, how many content types you have, how many integrations need reconnecting, and how much of your content is actually still in use. A straightforward site might take a matter of weeks. A larger site with several custom content types, multiple integrations and years of accumulated content will take longer, and we'd rather give you an honest timeline upfront than a fast one we can't hold to. We'll give you a proper estimate once we've seen what you're working with.
Not if the migration is handled properly, which is why redirect mapping is one of the first things we plan, not one of the last. Every existing URL gets mapped to its new address, and redirects go live the moment your new site does. Some fluctuation in the days immediately after launch is normal as search engines re-crawl the site, but a properly planned migration shouldn't cost you meaningful rankings. It's the single area where cutting corners causes the most damage, so we don't.
Yes, we've worked across a range of source platforms, and the underlying process is broadly similar whichever one you're moving from: audit what you've got, map it to Umbraco's structure, migrate the content properly, and test everything before launch. Some platforms carry more quirks than others, older or more bespoke systems in particular can need extra work to extract content cleanly, so we'll always assess your specific setup before quoting rather than assuming every migration looks the same. There's no single migration path that fits every platform, which is exactly why we scope each one individually rather than running every client through the same process.
Your content and structured data get extracted from your current database and rebuilt within Umbraco's own structure, rather than transferred as-is, since Umbraco's underlying database format is different to most other platforms. This is where a proper content audit and mapping stage matters: it's how we make sure nothing gets lost or garbled in the move, and how we catch anything that won't translate cleanly before it becomes a problem on your new site.
No, not unless you want one. A migration can be a like-for-like move of your existing design into Umbraco, an opportunity to tidy up the parts that have never quite worked, or a full redesign alongside the platform change, it's entirely your call. We'll talk through what makes sense for your site rather than assuming a migration automatically means starting from scratch.
It varies with the size of your site, the number of content types and integrations involved, and how much of your existing content needs auditing before it moves. Rather than give you a number that doesn't hold, we scope every migration properly upfront, content audit included, so the figure you take to your board is the one you actually pay.
We build and test your new site on a staging environment first, so your existing site keeps running normally throughout most of the process. There's typically a short window around go-live itself where things switch over, and we'll always plan that for the lowest-impact time for your business, rather than whatever's easiest for us.
Less than you'd think. Access to your current site and any relevant credentials, a sense of which integrations matter most to your team, and someone who can answer questions about how the site's actually used day to day. We'll handle the technical audit from there. If you're not sure what you'd even need to gather, that's a perfectly good place to start a conversation, get in touch and we'll talk it through.
