Everything You Need to Know About Umbraco 17
Umbraco 17 is here, and it marks an important turning point for organisations looking to scale their digital presence to an enterprise level. This Long Term Support release builds on the progress Umbraco HQ has made with its community and partners in Umbraco 14, 15 and 16; delivering a mature, future ready website content management system that prioritises stability, longevity, and editorial flexibility.
The focus is clear. A modernised foundation, better performance, and a long term platform that provides businesses with the confidence they need to plan the growth trajectory of the next few years.
But what does the latest release of Umbraco 17 offer enterprise level businesses like yours?
Umbraco 17 arrives on the solid foundation established by the release of .NET 10 Long Term Support (the newest release in the .NET framework which we covered in our blog here), giving partners and clients the predictability required to build and deliver web builds reliably. When Microsoft releases a Long Term Support version of .NET, enterprises lean in because it provides a secure and dependable base for years to come.
Umbraco 17 aligns with the release cadence of the newest in .NET, providing extended support and a predictable upgrade path. Organisations can plan multi year projects, integrate enterprise systems, and build at scale with confidence.
What this Means for Your Business
For decision makers, this alignment matters. It provides a stable runway for digital investment and ensures that the most recent version of Umbraco will be supported well into the future. Enterprise teams gain reliability, while development teams benefit from performance, productivity, and a modern development environment. This stability reduces risk and supports more effective budget and roadmap planning.
Umbraco 17 introduces significant performance improvements, making the CMS faster and more responsive. A standout feature is the ability to load balance the backoffice. Previously, only the public facing website could run across multiple servers, with the backoffice limited to a single machine.
What this Means for Your Business
Large editorial teams often encountered bottlenecks, but now the entire backoffice can scale horizontally, improving performance, resilience, and productivity.
Content heavy sites benefit from faster rendering. Editors enjoy a smoother backoffice experience. Developers see improvements in build speed and runtime performance. Together, these enhancements contribute to a more responsive website that supports engagement and conversion.
Another impactful change is the introduction of consistent UTC date handling. All system dates, including creation, updates, publishing, and logs, are now stored and exposed in UTC. This ensures scheduled publishing works reliably across regions, eliminates time drift, and simplifies collaboration in distributed teams. A new Date Time Picker also provides timezone selection for editors, reducing confusion on global websites and providing a more stable and predictable editing experience.
An example of how this is implemented is presented below:
“In a distributed team, an editor in London can schedule content to publish at 09:00 UK time. A colleague in New York viewing the schedule will see the planned publication in their local time. The date and time are persisted in UTC, ensuring the scheduled publication time is ambiguous from the server perspective and goes live at the time both editors expect.” - Umbraco 17 LTS Release
What this Means for Your Business
Content publishing across time zones becomes predictable and error free, even for global teams. Campaigns go live on time across regions, reducing the risk of mistakes and improving operational efficiency.
Umbraco 17 is available on Umbraco Cloud from launch, providing organisations with a stable and future ready platform. A key enhancement is support for load balancing the backoffice, allowing the entire CMS to scale horizontally. While full Cloud load balancing is still being finalised by Umbraco, this foundation enables better performance, higher concurrency, and improved resilience for demanding workloads.
Alongside this, operational improvements rolled out since Umbraco 16 continue to enhance Cloud deployments. Targeted CI/CD, hostname monitoring, managed challenges, custom Identity Provider support, and daily bandwidth insights make Umbraco Cloud a controlled, secure, and low maintenance way to run the CMS.
What this Means for Your Business
Your website can handle increased traffic and complex workflows without disruption. The platform is easier to manage, more secure, and reduces maintenance overhead, freeing up resources to focus on business priorities.
Umbraco’s UI Builder allows teams to create fully integrated custom management interfaces in the backoffice without complex code. Interfaces built with UI Builder are future proof, automatically upgrading with new Umbraco versions, making custom solutions easier to maintain and scale.
Umbraco Deploy now supports transferring Engage setups between environments, simplifying synchronization of configuration items such as segments, personalisation setups, staging and production. Analytics and engagement data remains unique to each environment, ensuring safe, predictable deployments across development, staging, and production setups.
What this Means for Your Business
Custom workflows and tools can be built and updated without expensive development. Website changes and deployments are safer and more predictable, reducing risk during updates or feature rollouts.
Umbraco 17 brings enhancements across its commercial ecosystem:
- Umbraco Cloud: The platform benefits from the new load balancing capabilities, operational improvements, and managed hosting features that improve scalability, resilience, and deployment confidence.
- Umbraco Engage: Fully aligned with the modern backoffice, now supporting Deploy for seamless configuration transfers across environments.
- Umbraco Commerce: A stable foundation for building online stores with tutorials and out-of-the-box features to get started quickly.
- Umbraco Forms: Transition to a subscription based licensing model with a simplified license key system.
- Umbraco Workflow: Enhanced with Release Sets and granular permissions for coordinated, large-scale content publishing.
- Umbraco UI Builder: Allows creation of custom management interfaces directly in the backoffice, fully upgrade ready with Umbraco 17.
What this Means for Your Business
The platform ecosystem supports business growth by streamlining processes, simplifying management, and providing tools for marketing, commerce, and content operations. Teams can deliver faster results with fewer errors.
Preparing for Your Upgrade to Umbraco 17
For those on Umbraco 14, 15, or 16, the upgrade to 17 is straightforward and recommended for organisations prioritising long term stability. Upgrades from older versions of Umbraco require more planning due to removed legacy features. Reviewing integrations and custom code early will help avoid surprises during the migration.
Upgrade to Umbraco 17 with Cold Banana
Umbraco 17 is a confident, mature Long Term Support release. Built on the modern .NET 10 LTS foundation, it delivers improved performance, a more seamless editor experience, and a stable, scalable platform for organisations looking to future proof their digital presence. This LTS release provides extended support and predictable upgrade paths, making it an ideal choice for businesses planning multi year projects, enterprise integrations, and large scale deployments.
As an Umbraco Gold Partner Agency, our team of Umbraco experts here at Cold Banana have worked with the platform since some of Umbraco’s earliest versions, cultivating a deep expertise in guiding organisations through upgrades and migrations.
By working with us, we can help unlock the full potential of what Umbraco 17 has to offer; maximising performance, stability, and long term value of your online presence to better deliver on your business objectives.
Get in touch with us today to discuss how we can make your transition to Umbraco 17 seamless and future ready!
