As long-standing Umbraco Platinum Contributing Partners and the UK’s first, we’ve been eagerly awaiting this release. Not just because of the performance and development upgrades, but because Umbraco 17 sets the foundation for the next era of .NET, composable architectures, and an even better editor experience.

At Shout, we’ve helped organisations like Novuna and the ICO successfully migrate to modern Umbraco versions, reducing carbon impact, improving performance, and cutting operational overheads. So when a major long-term support (LTS) release lands, it’s a moment we pay close attention to. And Umbraco 17 gives teams plenty to be excited about.

Why Umbraco 17 matters

This release isn’t just a version bump; it’s a milestone marking Umbraco’s move into a fully modern, cross-platform, high-performance CMS that opens new doors for developers, marketers, architects, and content teams alike.

Here’s what stands out.

Built for the future with .NET 10

Umbraco 17 is built on .NET 10, bringing serious performance gains and long-term stability. This matters for teams planning strategic upgrades, something we’ve seen firsthand in projects like Novuna’s migration from Umbraco 8 to Umbraco 13, where modern .NET architecture delivered major sustainability and cost benefits.

With Umbraco 17, performance optimisation becomes baked-in, giving organisations a solid platform to build large estates, headless solutions, and composable digital experiences.

Load-balancing the Umbraco Backoffice - scale out, not just up

One of the most impactful changes arriving with Umbraco 17 is something organisations have been waiting on for years: a fully load-balanced backoffice.

Previously, even the most advanced Umbraco setups had a limitation. While the public-facing website could scale across multiple nodes, the backoffice was tied to a single server. For large editorial teams, this often meant:

  • A performance bottleneck at peak times
  • A single point of failure
  • Restrictive infrastructure options
  • Slower editorial workflows when teams needed them to be fast

With Umbraco 17, those days are gone.

The backoffice can now run across multiple servers, just like the front end. This fundamentally changes what the platform can support:

  • Horizontal scaling for content workflows - ideal for large teams or global operations
  • Improved resilience - no more reliance on one machine to power every editor action
  • Cleaner, unified infrastructure - one application architecture, fully scalable end to end

For enterprises with busy publishing teams, this is a huge step forward. It means editors can work faster, deployments become smoother, and capacity scales naturally as the organisation grows, all while maintaining a modern, cloud-ready footprint aligned with Umbraco’s broader direction of travel.

The cleanest upgrade path yet

If you’re on Umbraco 13, 14, 15, or 16 the move to 17 will be significantly smoother thanks to:

  • Cleaned-up APIs
  • A more consistent surface area
  • Gradual migration support

This plays directly into the advice we regularly give clients: proactive upgrade planning pays off. The longer businesses wait, the more complex (and costly) technical debt becomes.

Stronger alignment with the composable DXP vision

At Codegarden and the Business Summit, the message was clear: Umbraco is doubling down on being the CMS core of a composable ecosystem - flexible, interoperable, and integration-ready.

Umbraco 17 supports that ambition through:

  • Faster APIs
  • Better extension points
  • Improved structure for headless delivery
  • Future-proof compatibility with new SaaS products like Umbraco Compose (launching 2026)

This aligns closely with how Shout deliver digital products, prioritising scalable architecture, clean integration layers, and user-centred platform design.

What this means for content editors

Great news: the editor experience continues to improve.

Umbraco’s roadmap and community updates highlight an ongoing commitment to:

  • More intuitive UI
  • Faster content operations
  • Enhanced support for block editing
  • Consistency across multi-site estates

For organisations like the ICO, who saw a dramatic improvement in editor usability through Block Grid and Block List migration, this is a major area of value.

Why now is the right time to plan your upgrade

The release of an LTS version gives you:

  • Long-term stability and support
  • A modern .NET foundation
  • A clear path to the future Backoffice
  • Better performance and reduced technical debt

And, as we’ve seen in recent client migrations, moving early unlocks:

  • Significant cost efficiencies
  • Reduced carbon footprint (Novuna achieved a 4,092.4 kgCO2e reduction)
  • A more secure, resilient platform
  • Happier editors and faster workflows
  • Cleaner infrastructure and automation opportunities

How Shout can help

We’ve supported organisations through every major Umbraco migration milestone. From large estates to high-risk versions reaching EOL. Our approach focuses on:

  • Risk reduction (parallel-run migration, phased releases)
  • Strong infrastructure foundations (IaC, Azure, RBAC, modern cloud patterns)
  • Editor-first experience design
  • Performance and sustainability gains
  • Future-ready architecture aligned to Umbraco’s roadmap

If you’re considering a move to Umbraco 17, we can help you assess your current estate, forecast complexity, and put an upgrade plan in place.

Final thoughts

Umbraco 17 marks a bold new phase for the platform, one rooted in performance, modern development practices, and a future-ready editor experience. It aligns perfectly with the trends we’re already seeing across the community: composability, sustainability, cloud maturity, and AI-powered tooling.

For us at Shout, it’s another exciting step forward in a platform we love contributing to, through community events, engineering excellence, and our ongoing work as a Platinum Contributing Partner.

If you’d like to talk through what Umbraco 17 could mean for your organisation, we’d love to chat.