Umbraco 17 Energizes Digital Experiences with Enterprise Load Balancing, Enhanced Search, and More

When Umbraco’s community talks, its HQ listens – and Bolette Kern helps turn those transactions into action. 

As Senior Product Manager for the legendary open source vendor, Bolette is at the front line with users, embodying what makes Umbraco “The Friendly CMS.” In fact, when news broke that Umbraco 17 was being released last week, she joined me for a call from a partner summit. 

She’s busy. And rightly so. Umbraco has been blazing trails recently, going back to this year’s CodeGarden event – where everything from a new MCP server to orchestration features via Umbraco Compose were unveiled.

But one of the jewels in the crown has been the hotly anticipated, long-term supported (LTS) version 17 of Umbraco, which Bolette calls a “major and milestone release.” As she noted, it follows the predictable six-month cadence for releases. But it’s also the realization of a two-year journey that began with its new backoffice architecture in Umbraco 14. 

Now, all of the pieces have aligned in this latest LTS, including a mature backoffice experience, a modernized content platform, and a concurrent ecosystem – from extension APIs to package compatibility. 

As Bolette said, this LTS version is an ideal fit for agencies and organizations craving stability, longevity, and growth. Making the move will give developers a host of new capabilities and essential updates, which is what makes this leap so critical.

“It's really important that we have people moving forward with us on this new LTS, because we’ve introduced quite a lot of necessary changes in 14,” she said. “Going from 13 up to 17, we have a job of making sure that people are joining us on this journey into a more modern platform that also supports what Umbraco is best at, which is being the most extendable and ‘Friendly CMS’ that's out there.”

While Umbraco sees this LTS as evolutionary, it still reflects the core pillars of freedom and flexibility, allowing developers to work with their preferred technologies and frameworks to build and customize their digital experiences. It’s the embodiment of a truly composable posture, allowing its community to build in almost any direction.

One of the big benefits of this LTS is the glide path to upgrade, and how Umbraco has reduced the friction associated with the move. “Organizations that have built projects on Umbraco 13, our previous LTS version, will have a direct upgrade path to Umbraco 17,” Bolette said. 

Customers upgrading to Umbraco 17 LTS will also benefit from its new backoffice architecture, extensibility, security, headless capabilities, scalability, and performance enhancements brought into the core CMS over the past two years.

Part of the impetus for upgrading is having a future-proofed foundation. As Bolette pointed out, the underlying .NET 10 is also an LTS version of Microsoft’s software. As such, customers will be on the latest .NET version – ensuring that any optimizations and improvements at the Microsoft layer are also reflected in Umbraco 17. 

“Both are LTS versions, which means that your Umbraco 17 projects will be future-proofed for at least three years,” she stated.

One really great attribute worth elevating: Umbraco has been focused on delivering an accessible backoffice throughout 2025, engaging with an accessibility consultant to review and improve its editor-facing workflows against WCAG standards. According to Bolette, most issues flagged in the audit have been remediated in 17, or are targeted for 17.1.

What’s new in Umbraco 17

Overall, there’s a lot. And if you’re up for a deeper technical review of repository caching or system date migration, I suggest reviewing this Release Candidate blog post. It’s a fantastic granular accounting of everything, from small upgrades to big features. 

Here's a video segment that unpacks the biggest improvements in Umbraco 17, featuring Lotte Pitcher, Head of Developer Relations, Niels Lyngsø, Technical Product Manager, and Senior Developers on the CMS team – Laura Neto and Nikolaj E. Lauridsen:

What really stands out in Umbraco 17 is the introduction of comprehensive backoffice load balancing and enhanced search functionality. While both features will appeal to a range of use cases, they further reflect Umbraco’s tacit focus on growing its enterprise portfolio, especially in the addressable North American market. 

As Bolette explained, many of the new features in Umbraco 17 are tailored to enterprises, offering advanced capabilities that are fit for large-scale organizations and global teams.

“There’s wind in the sails for moving upmarket right now,” she said. “So everything we do, including some of the features that we’re introducing in Umbraco 17, is catering to the more enterprise-scale projects. For example, load balancing in the backoffice really caters to projects that have 100-plus editors.”

Backoffice Load Balancing

Without question, the ability to load balance the backoffice in Umbraco is a major step forward – and a big win for enterprise workloads. Previously, only a public-facing website could run across multiple servers, while the backoffice was restricted to a single machine. This killed performance for larger teams that swarmed one server for all content creation and media management, severely impacting scalability and resilience.

Now, with Umbraco 17, you have one unified application that can scale horizontally to meet your needs. Effectively, your entire backoffice can run across multiple servers – just like a front-end website. This gives content teams greater confidence over performance, improved resilience by eliminating a single point of failure, and a simpler infrastructure to worry about.

Load balancing provides the elasticity that enterprises rely on for performance, particularly in high-volume editorial workflows. The benefit to large, distributed teams and organizations is clear, hence why Umbraco CTO Filip Bech Larsen called it a “game-changer for enterprises” that have multiple content editors working on their website at the same time.

Enhanced Search

Semantic search is driving a large share of the customer engagement across digital experiences. By some accounts, as much as 43% of website visitors opt for the site search, with a clear preference for natural language.

Umbraco’s enhanced search is helping to meet this demand. The feature arose from digital agency partners who were tasked with adding semantic search to customer sites. Obviously, there are numerous tools across the market that provide site search, and with Umbraco 17, you can plug in abstractions that deliver those capabilities via your preferred search provider.

MCP, Cloud, and more

I already alluded to the additional granular features of the updated backoffice, specifically as it relates to the new load balancing capability. On top of that, the Umbraco 17 LTS also benefits from a HybridCache feature that optimizes content loading and multi-site support features introduced in Umbraco 15. 

Further reflecting the enterprise focus, there are Block Level Variations that enable global organizations to make local language content changes while maintaining their core brand standards with consistency. There’s also role-based permissioning that’s accessible via the Client Credentials feature.

Another big change worth noting is the replacement of TinyMCE with a new open-source rich text editor, TipTap. The transition is designed to improve not only the content editing experience, but also handle license compliance out of the box. I recently wrote about how CMS use cases for RTEs are diminishing, and open source options like this do offer clear advantages.

I mentioned MCP earlier, but it’s a vital part of the growing agentic strategy for Umbraco. The final version of the Developer MCP is live, which delivers full API parity with Umbraco’s Management API and a host of refinements. While the Developer MCP is largely designed for technical folks, forthcoming capabilities will be focused on weaving AI across everyday editorial workflows. This includes enhancements like Tools Collections, an Editor MCP, and more.

With the rebrand of uMarketing Suite complete, 17 now aligns its backoffice experience with Umbraco Engage, which introduces Deploy support – making it easier to transfer configs like segments, personas, and more while maintaining analytics data in each environment. 

Umbraco 17 is also available on Umbraco Cloud immediately and provides some key enhancements for enterprises. This includes a Custom Identity Provider support for the Cloud Portal that centralizes authentication and daily bandwidth insights to improve operational visibility and capacity planning.

Maintaining openness

Umbraco 17 might be a technical evolution, but the company hasn’t changed its fierce commitment to community. Maintaining engagement and supporting open source contributions remain at the heart of Umbraco’s strategy, which firmly roots the trust that users and enterprises rely on. 

I asked Bolette how the changes in this latest version – or any version for that matter – are telegraphed with the community to build consensus and adoption. 

“I think it really comes down to being very honest and transparent about what it is that we see as the key benefits,” she said. “When we say we’re the most friendly and most extensible CMS, that’s really true to the bone. Being very transparent about what we do is helping us along the way to get this message out.”

The last few years have seen solid growth and expansion for Umbraco. As it looks ahead, partnerships will be a critical ingredient in the recipe for success. As such, the company is focused on reinforcing its relationships to fuel innovation and opportunities.

“It’s really been such a great experience seeing how this started in the community,” Bolette said. “Now, we’re sitting in conversations with partners that are building things on top of MCP, and they’re just so proud of showing off what they have built. Having that super close connection to what our ecosystem and what our partners and the community are doing is key.”

Like all software, CMS platforms are in a constant state of improvement. What makes Umbraco different is its open source community and the ideation and innovation it brings to the evolutionary track. The resulting DNA offers stronger bonds, passing down the best traits of human thinking, connection, and inspiration – even as technology continues to change. 

With Umbraco, you're not just leveraging a product or an LTS. You're investing in the people behind it. And that core of community is one of its greatest assets. 

You can get more details on Umbraco 17 here. 

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