Tips for maintaining your Umbraco website
It is important to keep your website up to date and running smoothly. This naturally also applies to Umbraco websites. Without regular maintenance, security vulnerabilities, compatibility issues and technical errors can develop and ultimately lead to poor performance or downtime.
Over time, a simple error can develop into a bigger problem that affects the user experience and makes it more difficult for both users and search engines to access the website. A regular maintenance routine therefore helps keep the solution secure, stable and technically up to date.
Why is it important to maintain Umbraco?
The short answer is: to ensure a stable and secure solution as well as a good user experience.
Umbraco is an open-source CMS that is continuously developed. Both minor updates containing bug fixes and security improvements and new major versions with more extensive technical changes are released.
Updates therefore help keep your Umbraco solution secure, stable and technically up to date. Among other things, they can close known security vulnerabilities, fix errors and improve performance.
However, this does not mean that every update should simply be installed immediately. An Umbraco solution typically consists of several technical components that depend on one another. Updates must therefore be assessed and tested in relation to the specific solution.
What needs to be maintained and kept up to date?
An Umbraco website consists of more than the CMS itself. A typical solution has several layers, all of which require ongoing attention:
- Umbraco CMS: The core system must be maintained and updated when relevant security patches, bug fixes and improvements are released.
- Packages: Third-party packages added to the solution must be monitored and assessed on an ongoing basis. Relevant updates must be tested and installed, with particular attention paid to packages that are no longer actively maintained or do not support newer versions of Umbraco.
- Custom-developed code: Code written specifically for your solution may require adjustments when Umbraco or .NET changes to ensure that the functionality remains compatible and secure.
- Integrations and APIs: Connections to systems such as ERP, CRM and PIM platforms must be checked for changes to API versions, authentication methods and data exchange.
- .NET dependencies: Umbraco is built on .NET. Both the .NET version in use and the solution's other dependencies must therefore be kept at supported and secure versions.
- Hosting environment: Server resources, the database, certificates, configuration and the rest of the infrastructure must be monitored and maintained. The specific responsibilities depend on how the solution is hosted.
- Backups and monitoring: Regular backups and ongoing monitoring are essential if you need to detect problems quickly and restore the solution when something goes wrong.
These areas are interconnected. An update to Umbraco CMS may affect both packages and custom-developed code, while changes made by an external provider may affect an integration even if nothing has changed on the website itself.
Keep an eye on Umbraco's support lifecycles
Do you know which version of Umbraco your website is built on? And do you know how long that version will be supported?
Umbraco releases both STS versions (Standard-term Support) and LTS versions (Long-term Support), which have a longer support period. Once a version reaches End of Life, it will generally no longer receive official bug fixes or security updates. You should therefore have an upgrade plan in place before the version you are using is no longer supported.
Minor updates can often be handled as part of ongoing maintenance. Upgrading to a new major version of Umbraco, however, is typically a separate task. It may require changes to packages, custom-developed code, integrations, the database and the hosting environment.
See Umbraco's current overview of LTS and End of Life ->
How to maintain your Umbraco website
Maintaining an Umbraco solution is about keeping track of the different technical layers and ensuring that they continue to work together.
This includes regularly checking for relevant updates to Umbraco, packages and .NET dependencies. At the same time, you need to assess whether the changes affect custom-developed code or integrations. An update should therefore be assessed not only on whether it can be installed, but also on whether the rest of the solution continues to work correctly afterwards.
It is also important to take regular backups of both the database and any files that cannot be recreated from the source code. These may include images and documents uploaded through Umbraco. Backups should be stored securely, and you should regularly test that they can actually be used to restore the solution.
A fixed maintenance plan can, among other things, describe how you handle:
- Regular reviews of updates and dependencies.
- Prompt assessment and implementation of critical security updates.
- Fixed backup intervals and retention periods.
- Regular restore testing.
- Ongoing monitoring of the solution.
- Clear procedures when monitoring detects an error.
- Planning major version upgrades.
This makes maintenance a fixed process rather than a task that is only prioritised when something goes wrong.
Testing updates safely in a staging environment
Before rolling out major updates or changes to the public website, they should be tested in a staging environment. This is a separate test environment that mirrors the production solution and configuration as closely as possible without affecting users of the public website.
This is particularly important for an Umbraco solution because updates to the CMS, packages or .NET dependencies can affect custom-developed code and integrations.
Testing should involve more than simply checking whether the front page opens. Depending on the solution, it may also be relevant to test editing and publishing content in Umbraco, forms and automated emails, login functionality, integrations, data exchange and other key features.
Once the changes have been tested and approved, they can be rolled out to the public website according to a fixed procedure. There should also be a plan for rolling back the changes if unexpected problems arise.
Do you need help?
We understand if the technical maintenance of your Umbraco website is not your main focus. Many updates take place behind the scenes and are not immediately visible to users. However, they are important because outdated components can increase the risk of security issues, compatibility errors and unstable operation.
At itpilot, we have extensive experience in developing, operating and maintaining Umbraco solutions. We therefore offer a security and update subscription, under which we handle the agreed ongoing updates as well as monitoring and backups. Major version upgrades and any adjustments to custom-developed code or integrations are assessed separately based on the specific solution.
Would you like to learn more about how we can help keep your Umbraco solution secure and running smoothly? Contact us for a no-obligation conversation. You can also call us on +45 87 25 07 87.
