Umbraco 2024 Impact Report
Umbraco has just released their Impact Report for 2024. It’s 61 pages long... but there’s some great content about their continued growth and plans for the future so we’ve summarised it here for you.
Umbraco has generated a 38% increase in revenue compared to 2023 (not bad for a license-free product), and they’re enjoying the pretty impressive stat of 1 professional Umbraco site being created every hour worldwide. To us, this growth shows investment in the product, the promise of evolvement and a longevity that we can rely on for our clients.
Their plans for 2025 revolve around four core elements; generative AI, search, personalisation and orchestration of data. Here are the key points from each of those cornerstones:
Generative AI – A Platform for Experimentation
“Generative AI is reshaping how content is created, but the technology is still evolving. Rather than prematurely embedding AI-driven features into Umbraco’s CMS platform, we’ve focused on enabling AI experimentation.”
We 100% agree with this approach. We are seeing that AI is not as ready for straight forward implementation as many clients think it is. For many businesses there are still some decisions to be made about cost versus gain at this point, and holding off to see the results of early implementation could be the smarter move.
Search – Building the Future of Content Discovery
“A great CMS platform is nothing without powerful search. That’s why we’ve set out to redefine how search is structured in Umbraco. With search set to become a core capability of the platform, our goal is to provide developers with more control over indexing, querying, and optimizing search experiences across all types of content. This will ensure that businesses can use built in search where it makes sense and seamlessly switch to more powerful external indexing solutions for cases like product discovery and large-scale enterprise search.”
This is music to our ears! Search is one of those things that appears ‘easy’ on the outside but actually soaks up a lot of development time to get them where you want them to be. Any development work that streamlines the search process, whilst still allowing bespoke integrations will be of benefit to our clients.
Personalisation – A New Cornerstone in the Umbraco Ecosystem
“Delivering personalised digital experiences is no longer optional - it’s an expectation. As personalisation becomes increasingly important across industries, Umbraco Engage will be a key pillar of our platform, helping businesses turn content into conversations that drive both engagement and conversion.”
We are so excited to get stuck into Umbraco Engage with our clients. Customer profiling and personalisation at your fingertips via a CMS is the dream of any marketeer. It’s a far more cost-effective option at this point in time than AI personalisation, and done well, will achieve the same outcomes.
Orchestration – Unifying Data Without Compromising Experience
“Modern digital platforms pull data from multiple sources - PIMs, ERPs, DAMs, and CMSs. In 2025, we will introduce a new approach to content and data orchestration. By ingesting data from any source and unifying it through a type schema, businesses will be able to serve just the data they need in a single request without duplication or complex integrations. The best part? Editors will manage and relate external data as if it were native to the CMS, while developers get a fast, scalable, and composable architecture.”
This is a really interesting one because it’s not something we’ve heard much about from other platforms. It would be a gamechanger. Integrating data between multiple sources has been a large part of our work in recent years. Everyone has a website, and the focus now is on making that website work harder, streamlining your admin process, and facilitating the use all the data available to you in one place. It sounds like it's early days for this but we’re looking forward to hearing more about it.
We’re really pleased with the knowledge of these key points of focus in 2025, they definitely align with our thoughts of where the world of websites is going and there are some great additions for our client base. We’ll look forward to talking to you more about them individually when the time is right.
In addition Umbraco are also working to reduce their CO2 emissions in various areas, have planted over 10,000 trees, are focusing on diversifying their workforce (with 54% of their new hires in 2024 being female) and investing in making their staff happier. That's the kind of partner we like working with :) You can read the full report here.