The problem
An industry research body's website had grown to around 2,400 pages on Kentico 13, most of it a research library of reports and supporting documents. They wanted to move to Umbraco without losing that library, their search rankings or the links people already had to it.
The approach
We kicked off in September 2024 and scoped deliberately: an old dashboard and member logins were left behind, so the effort went where visitors actually were.
I split the content by how it could move. The research library (about 520 reports and 860 supporting documents across 25 focus areas) and the media library were migrated by script. Smaller sections such as About and Education were rebuilt by hand, where the team wanted to refresh the content anyway.
Search moved to Algolia, with instant results across reports and documents. Before launch we crawled the old site to check what had and hadn't moved, and the go-live checklist covered URL structure, search, analytics, security headers and an SEO crawl, so launch day came down to a DNS switch.
The outcome
The new site launched in 2025 and has been maintained on the same codebase since. As Umbraco 13's support window started to close, I scoped the upgrade path to Umbraco 17, so the client could plan and budget for it rather than be surprised by it.