Upgrade your CMS or move to Umbraco, without losing what works

At Yoyo Design, we handle upgrades and replatforming for organisations stuck on aging or limiting CMS platforms. The work has a similar shape, moving a working website onto a better technical foundation, but the reasons vary. Some clients are on end-of-life Umbraco versions. Others are moving off Sitecore, Kentico, Drupal or WordPress because the platform no longer fits how the business operates.

What good replatforming and upgrades have in common is the outcome. You end up with a website that is faster, more secure and easier to maintain, and you have not lost your content, your search visibility or your team's confidence in the process. What bad ones share is also similar. Rushed migrations, broken integrations, lost traffic, disengaged editors, scope creep and a project that takes twice as long as it should. We have been brought in to clean up enough of these to know the patterns.

As a Registered Umbraco Gold Partner with in-house development, content, SEO and design expertise, we treat every upgrade or replatform as a managed migration. Structured planning, controlled environments, careful cutover and clear accountability throughout.

We start with what your website needs to do, not with the destination CMS or the latest version. Then we work back to whether an upgrade, a replatform or simply a different scope is the right answer for your situation.

We shape every upgrade and replatforming engagement around:

• A safe path off an unsupported or limiting platform - upgrading Umbraco or replatforming to it without the risks that come with rushed or under-planned migrations.

• Content preserved properly - careful mapping of content types, structures and relationships so nothing important is lost in transit, and editors recognise what they are working with.

• SEO protection as standard - URL structures, redirects, metadata and structured data treated as essential, not bolted on at the end.

• Integrations handled deliberately - existing CRM, marketing, analytics and bespoke connections planned for, tested and rebuilt where needed, not discovered mid-cutover.

• Honest about scope - clear discovery up front, and clear conversations when discovery reveals more, so scope changes get planned rather than scrambled.

• An editor experience that is actually better - your team gains a CMS that is easier to use day-to-day, not just a newer version of the one they already disliked.

The aim is a website your team is genuinely glad to have moved to.

Upgrades and replatforming cover a wide range of project types. Our offering focuses on the three areas where we see the most demand, and we will tell you honestly if the answer for your situation is not one of these.

Umbraco Upgrades
Moving your website from an older Umbraco version, typically Umbraco 7 or early Umbraco 8, onto a current long-term-supported release. Delivered as a managed migration with proper environment setup, content and integration handling, performance work and SEO preservation. We typically recommend Umbraco 17 LTS for stability and future support, with Umbraco 10 or 13 as alternatives where they fit better. You can read more in our detailed Umbraco Upgrades service page and our take on Umbraco 17 LTS.

CMS Replatforming to Umbraco
Moving your website to Umbraco from another CMS, whether that is WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, Kentico or a bespoke legacy system. We handle content audit and mapping, redirect strategy, integration planning, build, migration and post-launch support. Replatforming is rarely about the CMS alone, it is a chance to fix the things the old platform made hard. If you are weighing up the decision, our writing on Umbraco vs WordPress, Umbraco vs Drupal, Umbraco vs Sitecore and Umbraco vs Kentico sets out the honest comparison.

Replatform Discovery & Planning
For organisations not yet ready to commit to a full replatform. We help you assess whether to move, when, to what and at what scope. That includes platform options, risk assessment, content and integration audit, indicative timelines and a clear recommendation rather than a glossy proposal. Useful when you need to make the case internally or sense-check the work before committing budget. If you also need a wider commercial view first, our digital strategy work sets the priorities that the replatform then delivers against.

We work with B2B businesses, charities, membership organisations, professional services firms and ecommerce brands. The common pattern is a website doing serious work, a platform that no longer fits and a real need to move without losing momentum.

That spans organisations on end-of-life Umbraco versions, brands reconsidering Sitecore or Kentico after licensing or roadmap changes, charities on aging WordPress sites that have outgrown the platform and B2B businesses on bespoke systems that have become a maintenance burden.

Examples of our wider transformation work include:

• RNLI for leading a large-scale digital transformation for one of the UK's best known charities

• IAM RoadSmart for driving digital transformation across a national membership organisation

• Zoonou for brand and digital transformation for a growing technology business

• B Lab UK for UX and digital strategy supporting the growth of the B Corp movement

If your platform has stopped fitting how your organisation actually works, we have likely worked through something similar.

Upgrades and replatforms are projects with real consequences if they go wrong. We run them as managed migrations in structured phases, so progress is visible, risks are caught early and decisions are made on the right information.

• Initial assessment of your current platform, codebase and integrations

• Strategy, target version selection and clear scope agreement

• Build and migration in a separate staging environment

• Content, SEO and integration migration with full QA

• Pre-launch testing across functionality, performance and search behaviour

• Planned cutover with minimal downtime

• Post-launch monitoring and handover into ongoing support

You always know what is being worked on, what comes next and where the trade-offs sit if priorities or scope need to shift mid-project.

Yoyo is a Registered Umbraco Gold Partner with in-house development, content, design and SEO teams. That mix matters here. Upgrades and replatforms touch every layer of a website, so doing them well requires the people who handle each layer to be in the same room rather than spread across three agencies.

Our team regularly upgrades clients from legacy Umbraco versions onto modern long-term-supported releases, and we replatform clients onto Umbraco from a wide range of starting points. We also write extensively on the topic, including making SEO friendlier in Umbraco, which covers a lot of what makes a replatform succeed or fail from a search visibility perspective. For deeper detail on upgrades specifically, see our Umbraco Upgrades service page.

Hosting migrations, which are a different thing entirely, are covered on our Hosting & Migrations service. We are clear about the distinction so the right work gets scoped correctly from the start.