Case study · Chelmsford City Council
Four Chelmsford City Council websites, upgraded to Umbraco 17.
The challenge
Chelmsford City Council runs four Umbraco websites, and all four needed to move off Umbraco 13 before it reached end of life.
The main council site, chelmsford.gov.uk, is used by residents every day to pay, apply and report, so it had to keep running. Alongside it sit City Life, Weddings at Hylands Estate and Invest Chelmsford, each with its own audience. We had already moved chelmsford.gov.uk from Umbraco 10 to 13, so we knew the code well.
What we did
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Audit and plan
We reviewed each site's packages, custom code and integrations, then planned the upgrades one site at a time so the council team only had one change to manage at once.
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Upgrade
Each site moved from Umbraco 13 to Umbraco 17 and the latest .NET, with packages updated or replaced and custom code brought up to date.
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Test and release
Every upgrade was checked on a staging site against the live version before it went live.
The result
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4
council websites upgraded
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17
Now on Umbraco's current long-term support release
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2
major upgrades for chelmsford.gov.uk, from 10 to 13 and now 17
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