This is the million-dollar question for many businesses that use older versions of the Umbraco CMS.  There are substantial business benefits to Umbraco 8: specifically around improvements to editing features for Multilingual sites; and improvements in site speed introduced by Nucache.  And of course Umbraco 8 has a longer shelf life - the retirement of Umbraco has been announced, so while Umbraco 7 continues to be patched for security reasons it isn’t benefiting from future product developments.

However, there is a cost to upgrading a site to Umbraco 8.  Umbraco 8 is a substantial breaking change (hence the major version number change) and all of the custom code in an Umbraco 7 site, including Views, Partial Views and Controllers will require changes to make them compatible with Umbraco 8.

Also, Umbraco 8 isn’t production-ready for some use cases, including those with a dependency on Umbraco Courier, Tea Commerce, and Stacked Content.

We feel that Umbraco 8 is definitely ready for Production use, however, YMMV so always think carefully before embarking on a Umbraco upgrade.

Upgrade Smoothly with Carbon Six Digital 

If you are unsure of upgrading due to the risk and cost involved, why not get in touch with us to learn how this can be minimised. We have been doing Umbraco upgrades for over 10 years and we have a well-rehearsed plan that can reduce the cost and the risk of the process.  Find out more about our Fixed Price Umbraco Upgrades.