Reading Room
United Kingdom
Our Umbraco services
Umbraco website design and build - Secure, accessible, and scalable websites built on the latest Umbraco versions.
Umbraco upgrades and migrations - Safe upgrades from legacy Umbraco to modern, supported versions.
Ongoing support and continuous improvement – flexible support options backed with a service level agreement.
Managed hosting – secure and flexible solutions that scale with demand, with experienced DevOps on hand to maintain your hosting infrastructure.
About Reading Room
Reading Room is a UK digital agency founded in 1996, with 30 years’ experience designing, building, hosting and supporting complex, business-critical websites. We create future-fit digital experiences grounded in curiosity. This allows us to understand our clients’ organisations, users and challenges in depth, so we can identify the right opportunities and deliver solutions that are robust, adaptable and effective over the long term.
We work end-to-end across the digital lifecycle, partnering with clients to shape briefs, define clear objectives, and align delivery to a shared long-term ambition. Our work spans strategic discovery and user-centred design, complex technical delivery, and ongoing optimisation to ensure digital platforms continue to perform, evolve and deliver value.
Awards and contributions
Umbraco Platinum Contributing Partner
2 x Umbraco MVPS
ISO 27001
Cyber Essentials Plus
Recent case study
Reading Room has supported The British Safety Council Umbraco platform for over five years, providing ongoing development, support and optimisation services. When we first onboarded the website, it was operating on Umbraco 7. To ensure long-term stability and security, we led an initial upgrade to Umbraco 8 and leveraged Umbraco’s Extended Long-Term Support (XLTS) provision to maintain compliance and security while planning a future-proofed platform strategy.
As Umbraco 8 approached end of life, BSC required a full strategic upgrade to Umbraco 13 (LTS). This was not simply a technical version upgrade. The project involved:
Migration from uCommerce to Umbraco Commerce
Refactoring integrations and API endpoints
Scripted migration of content, media and SEO metadata
Preservation of the existing UX and brand experience
Re-architecting product, pricing and membership structures
Ensuring continuity of CRM and authentication services
The objective was to deliver a secure, scalable, commerce-enabled platform that would support future innovation, including personalisation and enhanced reporting.
Platform upgrade & architecture
We executed a structured upgrade path from Umbraco 8 to Umbraco 13 LTS, providing BSC with a modern .NET Core architecture and long-term support roadmap.
The migration included:
Scripted content and media migration using Umbraco core tooling
Full SEO metadata migration to preserve rankings
Rebuild using a component-based architecture
Implementation of the Block List Editor for flexible content management
Deployment within a load-balanced environment
The existing design and UX were preserved to ensure continuity for users, while the underlying platform was modernised.
Commerce transformation – uCommerce to Umbraco Commerce
A key strategic shift was the move from uCommerce to Umbraco Commerce.
We delivered a proof of concept to map existing functionality to Umbraco Commerce, validating feature parity and identifying opportunities to simplify architecture. The product database was migrated into Umbraco Commerce, enabling tighter alignment between content and commerce. Removing previous segmentation between product and CMS content structures.
Key enhancements included:
Native product variant handling and pricing
Structured SKU categorisation
Built-in bundling functionality
Simplified management of membership products and associated bundled items
Out-of-the-box Stripe and PayPal integrations via secure API configuration
Custom basket and checkout rebuild to maintain existing user journeys
Enhanced reporting capabilities from the commerce engine
Pricing logic was consolidated into Umbraco Commerce (previously split across systems), improving transparency and reducing CRM dependency for pricing management.
Integrations & authentication
BSC’s ecosystem required complex CRM and authentication integration.
We rebuilt and updated API endpoints to ensure compatibility with the new architecture. When a membership or product is purchased:
Product SKUs and transaction data are synchronised with the CRM
Member records are updated in real time
Permissions are applied to control content and product access
A custom authentication server validates and authorises CRM contact records, enabling secure access to purchased resources, LMS materials and member-only content.
Future-ready foundations
The platform is now positioned for continued innovation, including:
Planned upgrade path to Umbraco 17 (LTS)
Introduction of Umbraco Engage for personalisation
Future enhancement of on-site search capability
