Kentico is ending support for Kentico 13 and earlier versions to align with its official product lifecycle and focus resources on the next-generation Xperience by Kentico platform. These older versions rely on outdated technologies like .NET 6, which Microsoft will no longer support, creating security and compatibility risks. By retiring legacy versions, Kentico can deliver stronger performance, cloud readiness, and innovation on its modern platform while ensuring users stay secure and future-ready.

If you choose not to upgrade, your current Kentico Xperience instance will continue to run, but it will no longer receive new security updates, hotfixes, or feature enhancements once your version reaches the end of support. Over time, this creates increasing risks and limitations, including:

• Security vulnerabilities: Without ongoing patches, your site becomes more exposed to modern security threats.

• Compatibility issues: New browsers, third-party services, .NET updates, and hosting environments may stop working reliably with your older version.

• Higher maintenance costs: You'll end up spending more time troubleshooting legacy issues, implementing workarounds, and keeping unsupported code running.

• No access to new features: You miss out on improvements in performance, personalization, marketing automation, deployment workflows, and the entirely new .NET architecture in Xperience by Kentico.

• Growing upgrade complexity: The longer you wait, the more difficult (and costly) the eventual migration becomes due to increasing technical debt.

In short, not upgrading doesn’t break your site immediately—but it does steadily increase risk, cost, and operational overhead while limiting your ability to evolve your digital experience.

The Kentico Migration Tool helps automate the transfer of content and data from Xperience 13 to Xperience by Kentico. It can migrate pages, structured content, media library files, and some user data—but only after developers configure the mappings.

A manual migration is still required to rebuild your site’s structure and functionality. This includes recreating content types, templates, widgets, front-end code, integrations, custom features, and any MVC components in the new .NET architecture.

Yes. You can run Kentico Xperience 13 and Xperience by Kentico side-by-side during your migration. This is a common approach that allows you to:

• Continue operating your existing Xperience 13 site with no disruption

• Build and test the new Xperience by Kentico site independently

• Migrate content gradually using the migration tooling

• Switch over only when the new site is fully ready

The two systems do not conflict with each other—they run on separate infrastructure, databases, and application code. Once your new site is launched, the Xperience 13 instance can be decommissioned.

Most structured content can be carried over with the Kentico Migration Tool, but functional and presentation-layer features must be rebuilt because Xperience by Kentico uses a new .NET Core architecture and a redesigned content model.

Typically automated or assisted by the migration tool:

• Structured content (pages, content items, fields)

• Media library files

• Taxonomies (tags, categories)

• Basic user and role data

• Page relationships (where applicable)

Typically requires a full rebuild:

• Page Builder widgets, templates, and sections

• MVC views, layouts, and all front-end UI

• Custom modules, providers, and integrations

• Automations, scheduled tasks, and custom workflow logic

• Search implementations (Azure, custom indexes)

• Forms and form components

• Personalization, A/B testing setups, and built-in marketing features

• Custom code built on the Kentico 13 API

In general:

• Content can often migrate, but functionality and presentation must be rebuilt.