Umbraco 11: The Time is Now

A great CMS is not just a secure portal for editing content, but an expandable platform that allows your online presence to innovate, adapt to your needs and grow with you.

For more than 15 years, Umbraco has been our CMS of choice from a design, build and marketing perspective. Today, this simple yet powerful platform continues to hit the spot for us and our wide range of clients across the private, public and third sectors.

Built on trusted Microsoft.NET software and being open source means continual improvement through a global and passionate development community. And no ongoing licence overheads or lock-in beyond the one-off set-up costs.

As with any CMS, optimal performance relies on regular maintenance and updates. With Umbraco HQ recently releasing version 11, this article will discuss just some of the new features and salient points when upgrading from the soon-to-be-sunsetted version 7.

Built on the Microsoft .NET 7 framework, the fastest version of .NET ever, means that Umbraco version 11 pages load quicker - make that 20% faster based on Umbraco HQ official tests.

Speedier page load times lead to an enhanced user experience and happier visitors, whilst also delivering SEO benefits given that page load speed remains a key ranking factor in the eyes of Google.

This also means lower demands on the web-server, enabling Umbraco v11 websites to cope with visitor number spikes; serving larger numbers of concurrent users without negatively impacting performance.

 

Content is managed via ‘blocks’ through Umbraco’s new block grid editor. These blocks can house every conceivable type of your own content, 3^rd party embeds or even dynamic e-commerce integrations to ensure your on-page objectives are met.

Managed centrally and not tied to specific templates, they can be added to any page, with one update to the master block immediately reflected across all instances, reducing rollout time and risk of inconsistencies.  

This supports a more efficient, flexible and modular approach to the creation and management of your content, helped by intuitive drag and drop capabilities.

Marketing teams and editors will relish the creative freedom with no need for developer support to make sweeping changes to key pages, add new sections or quickly create unique campaign landing pages – with no compromise to your valued web visitors at work, home, or on the move

Adhering to accessibility means you are improving the usability of your site for all users.

A new feature with v11 allows you to set your required accessibility standards ensuring that key accessibility criteria such as missing ALT text on an image or an incorrectly chosen header type are never left unaddressed.  

Being flexible as you would expect, any changes in legislation or accessibility standards can be easily managed, helping to keep your site up to speed with WCAG standards.

For our clients, this means that your new site will be accessible to everyone, including users with impairments to their vision, hearing, mobility, thinking and understanding.

We know that the supply and population of content can be time-consuming, which is why we factor in content migration through a bulk import process as part of any upgrade work.

Whether your navigation system and layouts are to remain untouched or subject to a refresh, our team will carefully map the content fields from your current to the upgraded site, before completing an import and quality check of all content including images and downloads to ensure everything is where it should be, and looking its best across the most popular devices and browsers.