Skip to main content

10 Umbraco Maintenance Tips To Keep Your Site Running Smoothly

Your website is a living and breathing entity that needs constant care and upkeep, and sites hosted on the Umbraco CMS are no different. While there are standard best practices to maintaining your website, Umbraco offers numerous features and packages that require their own special love and tenderness. Below, our Umbraco developers put together a list of Umbraco maintenance tips that you should keep top of mind when looking at your Umbraco website, and how you can keep it running at peak condition at all times.

Be On The Latest Version Of Umbraco

In order to stay up to date on all new Umbraco features and awesomeness, you should always make sure that your website is on the newest version of the Umbraco CMS. Umbraco 8 was just released in February and it's the latest and greatest in the Umbraco 

Keep Umbraco Packages Up To Date

Umbraco and the Umbraco community offers numerous packages to help you run your Umbraco website more efficiently. Ranging in categories from E-commerce to SEOsecurity to CRMs, you’ll be able to add the Umbraco packages that have the greatest impact on your website performance and bottom line. Just like ensuring your website is on the most recent version of Umbraco, you should also make sure that your packages are tested on and compatible with the newest version of Umbraco.

You can check this by reviewing under Project Compatibility on the project page:

Conduct Regular SEO Audits

Tying these last couple of points together to make a larger point, it’s important that you’re conducting regular SEO audits of your website. To do so you’ll need a consistent schedule of check-ins using your choice of SEO tools to watch rankings, check for page errors, and overall site performance.

You’ll want to keep your eye on SEO site items like:

  • Page titles
  • Broken pages
  • Broken internal links
  • Broken images / media
  • Tags
  • Schema

And more. If your keeping a regular eye on these items, not only do you provide a great user experience, but you greatly increase your chances of enhancing your website’s organic visbility. Not sure where to start? There are tons of great SEO resources online, like these from Moz.

Also, our team of SEO experts and Umbraco Masters collaborated to create a few Umbraco SEO packages to get you started on keeping SEO tabs:

Run Scripts To Check Your Forms

Chances are you have forms or calls to action on your website that require a user to put in information to show they are interested in your services or products. Forms, like any functionality of a website, can sometimes break, or simply just not work the way should. This can lead to missing purchase or lead information, but most importantly, it leads to a terrible user and brand experience. If a user gives up important information for your services and doesn’t receive a response or a product, this can cause friction and potential bad reviews.

At Marcel Digital, we highly recommend regularly testing your website’s forms to avoid this kind of friction. While not Umbraco specific, we use Ghost Inspector to help us test our partner’s website forms weekly, receiving email notifications if forms are not operating properly or having trouble submitting.

Separate Your Umbraco Data (Media, Forms, Etc.) From The Umbraco Website

Basically, you have the run time which is the Umbraco website running with all of the files it needs to run, and then there are the data files, which is anything that has images, videos and form configurations. You want those separated so that you can move the website wherever you want and the data doesn’t have to go with it – but you can still access it from a different location. The benefit of doing this is really for deployments of Umbraco, where you can deploy a fresh copy with all of your updates each time, and you don’t have to worry about those files getting deleted and keeping them in sync with form configuration files. To separate our data, we use Azure Blob Containers in conjunction with the Umbraco Azure File System Provider package.

Use uSync To Keep Umbraco Backoffice Data In Sync Across Environments

If you have Umbraco running in multiple environments, changes to data types, document types, etc., aren’t persistant across environments – such as your test, staging, and production websites. Without a way to keep these in sync, you have to manually go in to each environment and replicate the changes each time. USync eliminates this by serializing that data into XML files, which can be carried from environment to environment in order to automate these changes for the user. If you’re using Umbraco Cloud to host your website, this is handled by Umbraco Deploy.

Hot Swap Deployments To Reduce Downtime

When you deploy an Umbraco instance, the application has to stop and be restarted to pick up the changes which have been deployed. This results in a small amount of site unresponsiveness for users while the site is being restarted. Using environment swapping, you can deploy the Umbraco to a staging environment and once that Umbraco instance is up and running, the staging and production environment can seamlessly swap, resulting in your users not experiencing an unresponsive website. At Marcel Digital, we leverage Microsoft Azure Cloud to perform this environment swapping for us.

Need Any Help?

Marcel Digital offers numerous Umbraco web development and digital marketing services to help you run your Umbraco website at it’s absolute best. If you’re having issues or have any questions, feel free to contact us and let us know – we’d love to hear from you!

  • Web Development

Alex Vilmur headshot

About the author

Alex Vilmur

Alex Vilmur is a wizard at development and also trumpet. He once auditioned for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, but found his passion for website development and Umbraco made it too hard to leave.