Umbraco changes fast: patches, versions, features. Ongoing Umbraco support keeps your site's security patches up to date and running properly, so you're never the one explaining why it broke.
Whether you're a marketing lead who inherited the platform, an IT manager juggling a dozen other systems, or the founder who built the site yourself, the worry's the same: something breaks and you're the one explaining it upward. We handle the technical side of keeping Umbraco patched, monitored and running properly, so nobody in your business has to become the platform expert overnight. It's steady, unglamorous work, and that's exactly the point.
Plenty of website owners feel exactly the same, even when it's not officially their job title. At its heart, Umbraco is still just the content management system running underneath everything else, and whether you call it a web support service or simply ongoing website maintenance, it deserves the same attention as any other part of the business.
Our approach to successful projects
Before we touch anything, we get a proper picture of what we're supporting. What version of Umbraco you're running, what's hosting it, what integrations and third-party packages are bolted on, and what's actually gone wrong in the past. Support agreements built on guesswork tend to miss the thing that actually bites, so we ask the unglamorous questions early: when was this last patched, who set up the hosting, has anyone documented the custom bits. This isn't the upgrade conversation, we're not deciding whether to move you to a newer version here, just building an honest map of what we're now responsible for keeping healthy. We'll also check what Umbraco HQ's own documentation says about your specific version, rather than relying on guesswork or outdated forum threads.
With that map in hand, we look at where things stand. Is the core up to date on security patches? Is anything already out of support? We flag anything urgent straight away, rather than letting it sit unnoticed. This is also where we work out what level of support cover actually fits your site, a low-traffic brochure site and a site handling daily transactions don't need identical treatment, and we'd rather size this properly than sell you more than you need. Whether that's a content-heavy business website publishing daily or a leaner site with a handful of custom development touches, the evaluation adjusts to match what's actually there.
This is where the support agreement itself takes shape: a monthly hours allowance, clear escalation paths, and a ticketing process that doesn't leave you guessing where things stand. Everything gets set up properly rather than bolted on, because a support agreement that only works when nothing goes wrong isn't really a support agreement. This is also where we agree what's covered and what isn't, in writing, so your support plan and any issue trackers we use are clear from day one, no surprises when an invoice arrives for something outside scope.
Every ticket, patch and fix gets logged on our side, so there's a clear record of what's happened and why, not left in a developer's head or an old email thread. If you'd like your team properly walked through a change, or a fuller write-up of how the site's put together, that's training and documentation work we're glad to do, just as a separate service rather than something bundled into every support hour.
Support doesn't stop once the agreement's signed. We keep an eye on Umbraco's own release calendar on your behalf, so an end-of-support date doesn't arrive as a surprise, and we flag it well before it becomes urgent, even though the upgrade itself sits outside this agreement. Regular check-ins mean you always know where your site stands, not just when something's gone wrong. Umbraco publishes different release types on its own schedule, and we keep track of those so you don’t have to.
Umbraco releases security patches on a regular cycle, and an unpatched site is an exposed one. We keep your installation’s security patches current on your existing major version, this is security patching, not a feature upgrade, and we’ll always be clear about that distinction.
If you’re on a version that’s already past its end of support, it’s effectively a dead end from a security standpoint, and getting back onto supported ground means an upgrade first, not something a patch alone can solve.
We track where your version sits against Umbraco’s own support timeline and make sure you’re never caught out by a date you didn’t know was coming. Deciding whether and when to move to a newer major version is its own conversation (see our Umbraco Upgrades page).
Your support agreement runs on a monthly hours allowance, protected by a fair use policy, so it stays sustainable rather than opening the door to unlimited work. You'll have phone support Monday to Friday, nine to five, plus a 24-hour Zendesk helpdesk for logging anything outside those hours.
Development work is billed at £90 an hour against our standard £100, with cheaper aftercare credits and training available too. If a job needs us dealing directly with your hosting provider, a plugin developer or another third party on your behalf, that's part of the service, one less conversation you have to have yourself. A few things sit outside standard support altogether: new development, platform upgrades (that's a separate service), and problems with your own email or ISP aren't something we can fix under this agreement.
Third-party software and plugin issues are different, we'll investigate those as part of support, but the fix itself isn't always included, and we'll flag that clearly before doing any chargeable work.
Something will go wrong eventually, a form stops submitting, a page throws an error, content editors can't publish. When it does, you've got a direct line to people who actually understand Umbraco, not a generic helpdesk reading from a script.
We diagnose the actual cause rather than patching the symptom, and tell you plainly what happened and why, in language that doesn't require a computer science degree to follow. Where the cause turns out to be third-party software or an external API acting up, we'll investigate and tell you what we find, but fixing it isn't always included in standard support, and we'll flag that clearly before doing any chargeable work.
Backups matter more than most people think about until the day they need one. Our hosting partner keeps 30 days of rolling backups as standard, covering your files, database and media. If something goes wrong on our side of the hosting, those backups are what we'd restore from.
If your site relies on Umbraco Forms for lead capture, that gets the same attention as the core CMS, since it's often the part most directly tied to new enquiries. We keep it patched and working properly, checking submissions are actually arriving where they should.
Where an issue turns out to be caused by third-party software, or by spam or email filtering on your own systems, that's outside what standard support covers, we'll tell you plainly rather than let it sit as an assumption.
Support only means something if you know what to expect from it. Priority-one issues get assigned within two working hours, with a fix or a clear plan within one working day where possible, less urgent issues follow their own agreed timescale. You'll usually be dealing with the same support contact, backed by a developer, so there's always technical cover.
We report back regularly on what's been done, so support feels like an ongoing relationship rather than a box you tick once a year and hope you never need.
Umbraco releases security patches on a regular cycle, and an unpatched site is an exposed one. We keep your installation’s security patches current on your existing major version, this is security patching, not a feature upgrade, and we’ll always be clear about that distinction.
If you’re on a version that’s already past its end of support, it’s effectively a dead end from a security standpoint, and getting back onto supported ground means an upgrade first, not something a patch alone can solve.
We track where your version sits against Umbraco’s own support timeline and make sure you’re never caught out by a date you didn’t know was coming. Deciding whether and when to move to a newer major version is its own conversation (see our Umbraco Upgrades page).
Your support agreement runs on a monthly hours allowance, protected by a fair use policy, so it stays sustainable rather than opening the door to unlimited work. You'll have phone support Monday to Friday, nine to five, plus a 24-hour Zendesk helpdesk for logging anything outside those hours.
Development work is billed at £90 an hour against our standard £100, with cheaper aftercare credits and training available too. If a job needs us dealing directly with your hosting provider, a plugin developer or another third party on your behalf, that's part of the service, one less conversation you have to have yourself. A few things sit outside standard support altogether: new development, platform upgrades (that's a separate service), and problems with your own email or ISP aren't something we can fix under this agreement.
Third-party software and plugin issues are different, we'll investigate those as part of support, but the fix itself isn't always included, and we'll flag that clearly before doing any chargeable work.
Something will go wrong eventually, a form stops submitting, a page throws an error, content editors can't publish. When it does, you've got a direct line to people who actually understand Umbraco, not a generic helpdesk reading from a script.
We diagnose the actual cause rather than patching the symptom, and tell you plainly what happened and why, in language that doesn't require a computer science degree to follow. Where the cause turns out to be third-party software or an external API acting up, we'll investigate and tell you what we find, but fixing it isn't always included in standard support, and we'll flag that clearly before doing any chargeable work.
Backups matter more than most people think about until the day they need one. Our hosting partner keeps 30 days of rolling backups as standard, covering your files, database and media. If something goes wrong on our side of the hosting, those backups are what we'd restore from.
If your site relies on Umbraco Forms for lead capture, that gets the same attention as the core CMS, since it's often the part most directly tied to new enquiries. We keep it patched and working properly, checking submissions are actually arriving where they should.
Where an issue turns out to be caused by third-party software, or by spam or email filtering on your own systems, that's outside what standard support covers, we'll tell you plainly rather than let it sit as an assumption.
Support only means something if you know what to expect from it. Priority-one issues get assigned within two working hours, with a fix or a clear plan within one working day where possible, less urgent issues follow their own agreed timescale. You'll usually be dealing with the same support contact, backed by a developer, so there's always technical cover.
We report back regularly on what's been done, so support feels like an ongoing relationship rather than a box you tick once a year and hope you never need.
Dave Nicklen, Support Manager at Gecko
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Support covers keeping your existing Umbraco site's security patches current, investigating and fixing bugs, backups, and a monthly hours allowance for the general upkeep of the site. It doesn't cover deciding whether to move to a newer major version of Umbraco, new development work, or issues with your own email or ISP, those sit outside standard support altogether. Third-party software problems are different, we'll investigate as part of support, but the fix itself isn't always included, and we'll flag anything chargeable before doing the work. In short, it's ongoing care for the Umbraco CMS itself, within a fair and sustainable set of hours.
Once a version passes its end of support date, it stops receiving security patches altogether, which leaves it exposed to vulnerabilities that will never be fixed for that version. Support alone can't bring an end-of-life site current again, that needs an upgrade to a supported version first. We'll always tell you honestly where your version sits and what your options are, rather than letting you find out the hard way.
Support keeps your current version's security patches up to date and healthy. An upgrade moves you to a newer major version of Umbraco entirely, which is a bigger, more deliberate piece of work with its own planning and testing. Some sites need both, plenty just need steady support on their current version. If an upgrade does turn out to be the right call, our Umbraco Upgrades service covers that separately.
Umbraco designates certain major versions as Long Term Support releases, meaning they receive security updates for longer than a typical release. If your site's on an LTS version, you generally get more breathing room before you need to think about upgrading. If it's not, that's worth knowing sooner rather than later, and it's exactly the kind of thing we flag as part of ongoing support.
It depends on how serious the issue is. A priority-one issue, your site being down, say, gets assigned within two working hours, with a fix or a clear plan in place within one working day. Less urgent issues follow their own agreed timescale rather than jumping the queue. You'll know which category something falls into from the moment you raise it, not left guessing.
Support runs on a monthly hours allowance, protected by a fair use policy, so it stays properly resourced rather than becoming an open-ended commitment on either side. If you're regularly not using your hours, that's not wasted, we'll use a Proactive Support Review to make sure the time's still going somewhere useful.
We can, depending on your setup. Some clients want us managing hosting end to end, others already have hosting sorted and just want us looking after the Umbraco side. Where we do host, that's on our own infrastructure, which is what our backup and recovery process covers. A failure on a self-hosted server we don't manage sits outside standard support, that's one for whoever runs that hosting.
Yes, Umbraco Forms is covered as part of standard support, since it's often the part of a site most tied to new enquiries. If you're running Umbraco Commerce, get in touch and we'll talk through what's actually possible for your setup, that's a separate conversation rather than something we can promise as standard here.
Yes, this is one of the more common reasons people come to us. We’ll take a proper look at the site first so we understand exactly what we’re inheriting, then get support running without any drama for you in the middle of it. This applies whether you're coming from a freelance developer, an agency, or an in-house web design team, our Umbraco developers will get properly familiar with what's already there before changing anything.
This page is specifically about supporting an existing Umbraco site. If you're weighing up whether Umbraco's the right platform for you, or looking at a build or migration, get in touch and we'll point you towards the right conversation.
A lot of the sites we take on support for have been running fine, mostly, for years, with nobody quite sure what's patched, what's not, or what would happen if something went wrong tomorrow. A short conversation is usually enough to work out where you actually stand and what level of support would suit your site, no pressure, no obligation to sign anything.
