When an Umbraco upgrade stalls mid-flight, I assess what exists, fix what blocked it and land it safely, with a fixed £8,999 price for 13 to 17 jumps.
Stalled upgrades all sound the same. It started months ago with reasonable confidence. Then the branch stopped compiling, or a critical package turned out to have no compatible version, or the developer doing it left, and now there is an upgrade branch nobody dares merge and nobody dares delete. The live site is still on the old version, the deadline that justified the project has crept closer, and every status meeting contains the phrase "nearly there".
The old way of fixing this is to ask whoever stalled to try harder, or to hand the whole thing to an agency that will quote for starting again from scratch. One prolongs the stall; the other throws away the real progress buried inside the mess. There is a third option: bring in someone who has finished this exact journey enough times to recognise where yours went off the road, and who charges a flat rate rather than a rescue premium.
I read the upgrade branch, the package list and the errors before touching anything. Usually one or two specific blockers caused the stall; the rest is demoralisation.
You get a plain-English verdict: what is salvageable, what must be redone, and how long the remainder honestly takes. No more "nearly there".
Incompatible packages get replaced or rewritten, breaking changes get resolved, and the branch starts compiling and deploying to a test environment again.
Content is refreshed, the site is tested against the old version's behaviour, and we launch on a quiet day with a tested rollback. Then your team gets the keys and the knowledge.
Almost never because anyone was incompetent. Upgrades stall because the estimate was made before anyone looked inside the packages, and the site turned out to depend on something that has no modern equivalent. They stall because the person doing them had a day job too, and the upgrade was what got dropped every time production needed attention. And they stall psychologically: after the third week of the branch not compiling, opening it starts to feel like punishment, and humans quietly stop opening it.
None of this is fixed by pressure. It is fixed by experience: I have taken sites through every version of Umbraco from 4 to 17, which means the error that has blocked your team for a month is usually one I have already met on someone else's site. That is the entire trick. There is no genius in it, just repetition.
A site running on modern Umbraco in production, your content intact, your editors working without retraining trauma, and the old version switched off. Along the way you get honest weekly progress you can repeat to your own stakeholders, because the worst part of a stalled upgrade is usually not technical, it is having nothing true to say in the steering meeting. This is standard Umbraco development discipline applied to an awkward situation, not a dark art.
If your stalled upgrade is the Umbraco 13 to 17 jump, my fixed price of £8,999 plus VAT usually applies even though someone else started the work; I will confirm after seeing the branch. Other version journeys are priced at my flat £500 day rate once the audit has sized the remainder, and the audit itself is a small, fixed piece of work. Everything is on the pricing page, and with Umbraco 13 security support ending on 14 December 2026, a stalled 13 upgrade has a real clock on it.
Send me access to the repository and one paragraph on where things stopped. Within a few days you will know exactly what you have, what it needs and what it costs, which beats another month of nearly there. Start through the contact page.
Tell me what you're working on and I'll come back within one working day.
A specialist Umbraco developer offering freelance / contract services to a wide variety of clients across the UK
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF