Are You Ready to Migrate? The BlueModus Playbook for Moving from Kentico 13 to Xperience by Kentico

Originally recorded: October 16, 2024 Guest: Dave Conder, BlueModus Founder & CTO

If you're running a website on Kentico Xperience 13, the clock is ticking. End-of-life dates are set and Microsoft's underlying .NET Framework is now obsolete. However, the newest version of Kentico's platform, Xperience by Kentico, represents a ground-up rebuild on modern technology and is ready for all customers. The question is no longer if you'll need to migrate — it's when and how.

I recently sat down with BlueModus Founder and CTO Dave Conder for a webinar walking through exactly what that migration looks like: what's changed in the platform, what tools exist to make the transition smoother, and how to build a strategy that sets you up for success rather than scrambling at the last minute.

You can watch the recording here or keep reading for a recap of our conversation. 

Why This Migration Is Happening Now

The short answer: Microsoft's .NET roadmap has dictated the upgrade.

.NET Framework — the development platform underlying Kentico 13 and its predecessors — launched in 2002 and reached its final significant version (4.8) years ago. Microsoft still includes it in Windows, but from a web development standpoint, it's a dead end. It's increasingly difficult to find developers who want to work in it, and the security and performance benefits of modern .NET (also known as .NET Core) are simply too significant to ignore.

Kentico made a strategic decision to treat this not as a forced upgrade, but as a clean-slate opportunity. Rather than patching their existing platform, they rebuilt Xperience by Kentico from the ground up using current technologies, including a React-based admin interface, modern .NET, and an architecture designed for where digital experience platforms are heading.

What's New in Xperience by Kentico

During the webinar, Dave demoed several of the editing capabilities that set the new platform apart from its predecessor:

• Content Hub: In older versions of Kentico, all content lived in a hierarchical tree — useful for pages, but limiting for everything else. The new Content Hub treats content as flat, reusable objects that can be surfaced anywhere: pages, widgets, APIs, headless channels, email campaigns. Smart folders let you create dynamic groupings based on rules — content type, publish status, taxonomy, last modified date — making it dramatically easier to manage large content libraries.

• Channels: The platform is built around the concept of channels, where a single content model can power a website, a microsite, an email campaign, or a headless API endpoint. Your content team manages content once; the platform handles delivery across channels.

• Inline content creation: One of the friction points in older Kentico versions was having to navigate away to create content you wanted to link. In Xperience by Kentico, you can create and link content inline while building a page — a small change that meaningfully speeds up the authoring experience.

Migration Toolkit Options

One of the most practical parts of the webinar was Dave's breakdown of the migration toolkits Kentico has developed, all open source and available on GitHub:

• Kentico Migration Toolkit — purpose-built to migrate from Kentico 11, 12, or 13 (MVC) to Xperience by Kentico. Handles content, page types, widget content, and forms.

• Sitefinity / Sitecore Toolkits — for organizations migrating to Kentico from competing platforms.

• Universal Migration Toolkit — platform-agnostic. Can pull content from WordPress, ERPs, PIMs, or any other system and map it into Xperience by Kentico's content model.

A notable use case Dave mentioned: BlueModus is already using the Universal Migration Toolkit not just for one-time migrations, but as a foundation for ongoing integrations — daily product feeds from ERPs, event data from learning management systems, and more. The toolkit's structured approach to content mapping has turned out to be a solid pattern for any repeating content integration, not just migrations.

If you're on a version of Kentico before version 13 (Portal Engine), you're not out of options. There's a migration path that moves through versions to get you to MVC before using the toolkit, but it does involve more steps.

How to Build Your Migration Strategy

Dave's recommended starting point: audit before you plan.

Before thinking about timelines or toolkits, understand what you actually have. That means:

• Catalog your content model. Is it structured and organized, or is most of your content in free-form WYSIWYG fields? Unstructured content takes more effort to migrate cleanly.

• Identify what's working and what isn't. A migration is the best time to make improvements. If your authoring experience is painful, fix it now. If your front end is dated, a redesign alongside a migration is more efficient than two separate projects.

• Apply the ROT test. For every piece of content and functionality, ask: is it Redundant, Outdated, or Trivial? Don't migrate what you don't need.

• Map your integrations. This is where breaking changes most commonly occur. Integrations built on .NET Framework code need to be updated or replaced, and some third-party dependencies may need to be swapped out entirely.

Once you have a clear picture of your current state, you can make an informed decision about your migration approach:

• Content migration — if your site works well and you primarily need to move to a supported platform

• Content migration + authoring improvements — if the platform works but the day-to-day experience for your content team is frustrating

• Redesign and rebuild — if significant front-end, back-end, or structural issues make a clean rebuild the more cost-effective path

The Urgency Is Real

Kentico 13 reaches end of life on December 31, 2026. That may sound like enough runway, but organizations that haven't started the planning process are already running short on time to execute a thoughtful migration before that date.

The good news: the tooling exists, the path is well-defined, and BlueModus has been working in this platform since its earliest versions. Whether you're confident in your current site or have concerns about what a migration might uncover, the best first step is an honest assessment of where you stand.

Ready to start planning? BlueModus can help you evaluate your current Kentico implementation, identify the right migration approach, and build a realistic plan. Contact us to get started.