How do I get an Umbraco website?

Getting the right start with Umbraco

If we boil it down to the basics, you can get an Umbraco website in three different ways: Build it yourself, hire a freelance developer or get an agency to build it for you.

The choice is, of course, based on a number of factors, but mainly: Your budget and your .NET skills (or lack thereof). This page will help you decide which way is just right for you to get started with a new Umbraco website.

How do I build an Umbraco Website?

Umbraco is an entirely open-source .NET project. This means that the CMS is completely free, so with the necessary skill, time, and coffee invested, you can build your perfect project through a combination of code, documentation, and packages.

You can download the free open source version and set it up yourself, or you can take a free Umbraco Cloud trial to see how it works.

But when the project is built and ready to see the light of day, another question arises: Where to host it?

Where do I host an Umbraco website?

You can work on Umbraco on your local machine, but once it becomes time to set it live to the world, you'll need to host your Umbraco website on a server. This can either be hosting it yourself (also called on-premise) or with a hosting provider. To save you the trouble of setup and maintenance, we built a stable and inexpensive hosting solution for you, called Umbraco Cloud. In addition to the hosting, Umbraco cloud also updates your current version of Umbraco to the latest one so you don't have to bother (along with many other features).

But what do you do if you like the idea of Umbraco and Umbraco Cloud, but you don't possess any .NET skills?

How do I find an Umbraco web developer?

Umbraco has a continually growing community of dedicated web developers. Some are part of larger agencies. Some choose to work alone.

If you are looking at a small to medium scale project, or just need some custom code for your Uno website, you can find a list of Umbraco certified developers with different levels and areas of specialization on our certified developer page.

But what if you need someone to help with a larger scale Umbraco project? Or maybe want to migrate from your current CMS to Umbraco?

How do I find an Umbraco development company?

Umbraco has a Partner program, which consist of the most competent and most active Umbraco development companies worldwide. And the certified developers we mentioned already? Certified and Gold Partner agencies are guaranteed to have developers trained and kept up to date with courses from Umbraco HQ.

This means that aside from a close partnership, they also get our highest stamp of approval on their skills. If you want an agency to help with all your Umbraco needs, head over to our partner agency index, and pick the right agency for your project.