I’m part of a small business team and and we got a quote from our dev agency to upgrade from v13 to v17 that seemed quite excessive. I understand that it’s an intricate process and that it’s impossible for a non-developer to grasp the amount of hours it takes, but since this would be a big hit on our annual budget (and the relationship has become strained over the past months), I just want to ensure that the amounts of hours quoted is reasonable.
I’m fully aware that it’s hard to give an opinion without knowing how everything is setup, so I was just looking for an average (best case to worst case scenarios you’ve come across) to compare it, please. A few points for context:
It’s a medium-size bespoke website comprising a few hundreds of content pages.
We don’t take transactions (payments) online; just a couple lead-generation forms.
We do have a few third-party integrations that have been added over time to remedy gaps in the original design.
I deeply appreciate any input you can offer to guide me. Thank you!
First, it depends if its fixed price or not. If so, they needed to have added all possible risks in the price.
Purely vanilla Umbraco is easy to upgrade. The database is taken care of by migrations and the frontend hardly needs any changes, if at all. You can almost do that in a day.
However, these things complicate:
If you are using legacy editors like nested content, they need to be converted and checked really well.
Macros and xpath queries also need to be converted and verified really well.
If you have a lot of backoffice extensions in v13, they need to be rewritten for v17.
If v13 plugins have not been updated for v17, that obviously is a problem.
And then there is the updates to any release pipelines and hosting etc.
So yes, it REALLY depends. We’ve done updates in a few days of modern v13 sites without much customization, to 100s of hours because of legacy stuff, outdates plugins and a lot of backoffice customizations.
Thank you so much for the prompt response, Luuk! The only thing they had flagged was the nested content, which they said could take almost 40h for that part alone - and that’s just a fraction of the total amount of hours anticipated. Anyway, not really sure how to go about it…
Regardless, I genuinely appreciate your help. Thank you!
As @Luuk said, it really depends on the complexity of the website and it’s integrations. There are also deprecated data types that need migrating such as Nested Content and Grid Layout, migrating macros to RTE blocks as well as re-writing of any custom back-office screens as v14 introduced a new way of developing back-office components.
40 hours for migrating Nested Content does seem a bit high as there are tools such as uSync Migrations that can help with this.
That said, I don’t know the code or what is involved so no one here will be able to comfortably give you an estimate until they know more.
I’ve migrated simple websites and brochures sites in a week, and more complex websites have taken months…
If you want a second opinion I’d be more than happy to have a conversation with you and your team.