The Umbraco Roadmap

Global Elements make it easier for editors to reuse and manage content across a website. Common content can be created once and reused in multiple places, including within Block List and Block Grid editors.

Editors manage Global Elements from a dedicated area in the backoffice and can insert them using an element picker. This is ideal for footers, call-to-action blocks, banners, and other shared content that appears across multiple pages. When a Global Element is updated, the change is automatically reflected everywhere it’s used, helping keep content consistent and up to date. Existing blocks can be converted into Global Elements and back again as needed.

Target release: Q2 2026

We’re introducing a new search abstraction layer as a separate package, designed to make it easier to integrate your preferred search providers with Umbraco. This new layer will enable flexible, developer-friendly search solutions, supporting both backoffice content search and server-side website search. 

The package will ship with example implementations to help developers connect Umbraco with external search engines such as Elasticsearch. By releasing the abstraction as a standalone package, we can deliver improvements and updates independently of core CMS releases, allowing for faster iteration based on community feedback.

We expect to include the abstraction into Umbraco at some point in the 18 to 21-cycle of releases. See the The Future of Search RFC for more information.

Target release: Q1 2026

We plan to gradually transition Umbraco’s data access layer from NPoco to Microsoft Entity Framework Core (EF Core). EF Core is a widely adopted and well-known Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) in the .NET ecosystem, and moving to it will make Umbraco’s data access layer more familiar and approachable for many developers.

As part of this process, services and repositories will be aligned with modern .NET patterns, including async/await throughout and more consistent use of identifiers.

This is a large change that will aim to deliver in smaller, incremental steps. We’ll introduce these refactorings a vertical slice at a time, implementing end-to-end from controller to database.

The long-term goal is to have all core services and repositories fully async and backed by EF Core, replacing NPoco across the platform.

Target release: Q4, 2026

We’re bringing the power of Umbraco MCP to editors in a more targeted, workflow focused way. The Editor MCP provides a narrow, purpose-built set of AI capabilities designed for editorial and content teams, fully hosted by Umbraco and ready to use without any setup or developer involvement.

The Editor MCP is optimised for real content tasks, such as drafting, rewriting, translating, analysing, improving SEO, generating metadata, and working with media, all without technical steps or configuration. The Editor MCP is optimised to handle all underlying steps in one action, instead of requiring multiple technical commands like “get content by ID”, “update property,” and “save node”. Instead, editors simply describe what they need, and the MCP handles the entire process behind the scenes. Examples of editor prompts include:

• “Create a new landing page for our autumn campaign, draft the hero copy, and pull in the latest product images from the media library.”

• “Rewrite this page to match our tone-of-voice guidelines and generate a meta description under 150 characters.”

• “Review this page, highlight potential accessibility issues, and fix any missing or weak alt text.”

• “Translate this page to Spanish and adapt culturally sensitive phrases for a Latin American audience.”

The result is a powerful, approachable AI assistant that feels natural, secure, and fully integrated with Umbraco (roles and permissions) — enabling editors to get high-quality results quickly without needing technical knowledge.

Target Release: Q2 2026

Improved visibility into the traffic your website receives per hostname, including details on traffic blocked by Cloudflare services, such as bots and other unwanted requests.

Target release: Q1 2025

In addition to implicit scoring, personas and journey steps will soon support explicit scoring.
This will allow directly triggered values to help personalize visitor experiences more dynamically.

Target release: February 2026

Umbraco Engage will be extended with MCP capabilities that support both working with Engage data and managing Engage configuration. This includes the ability to create and maintain personas, journey steps, content scoring, goals, segments and A/B tests. The result is a more efficient way for marketers, editors, shop owners and developers to set up, adjust, and automate personalization strategies.

Target release: H1 2026

Bot Detection will be enhanced to better identify and filter non-human traffic across analytics and personalization features. This update improves data quality, ensures more accurate reporting, and strengthens segmentation by isolating real visitor behavior from automated activity.

Target release: March 2026

The Deploy interface will be updated to offer a clearer and more intuitive workflow for transferring content and schema changes. This includes improved visibility of deployment states, better guidance during conflict resolution, and a more streamlined experience for editors and developers working across environments. The goal is to make deployments easier to understand, faster to execute and more predictable for all users.

Target release: May 2026

Deploy will be improved to allow content transfers even when schema differences exist between environments. This gives editors more flexibility to move content without being blocked by structural changes in progress. The system will provide clear guidance about mismatches and handle transfers safely, helping teams maintain momentum while developers work on updates.

Target release: May 2026

An Audit Trail will be introduced to provide a clear record of deployment activity across environments. This will show who initiated a transfer, what was moved, and when it happened. The improved visibility supports better collaboration, easier troubleshooting, and stronger governance for teams working with multiple environments.

Target release: May 2026

The Analytics section of your shop will be enriched with some new Analytics widgets. Think of 'Applied Discounts', 'Most Popular Discounts', 'Top 50 Buyers' and more.

Target release: January 2026

Umbraco Forms will be extended with Enhanced Form Analytics. This will provide an overview of how often Forms are being submitted, your best performing Forms, best converting moments and more.

Target release: February 2026

Umbraco UI Builder will be extended with async support to enable more flexible and performant data handling. This allows UI Builder integrations to work smoothly with asynchronous data sources and external APIs.

Target release: February 2026

We are building a new product called Umbraco Compose, which embraces the best of breed and a headless approach, composing multiple data and content sources into a unified output. Our goal is to provide developers with a standard SaaS solution that addresses many of the challenges currently handled through custom code - such as in a BFF (Backend for Frontend) setup.

Read more about Umbraco Compose in this product update, or sign up for the launch list and be the first to receive news and updates about this product.

Target release: Q1 2026

Improve collaboration for editors working in the Umbraco backoffice. Editors will be able to see when others are active on the same document, helping avoid conflicting changes.

This work also aims to introduce better support for comparing changes and offering options for resolving or merging edits when multiple people work on the same content. The goal is to make team-based editing clearer, safer, and more efficient.

Following the initial release of the search abstraction as a package, we plan to integrate it directly into the core Umbraco CMS. This will make the search abstraction a first-class part of the CMS, simplifying project setup and ensuring consistent support across the platform.

This core integration will make it easier for developers to swap out Examine for an external search engine without needing to install additional packages or manage separate dependencies. Examine will remain the default search provider, but replacing it will be far cleaner and more maintainable.

The integration is expected to be released after Umbraco 17 in a subsequent major release in 2026.

Throughout 2025, we’ve been working with an external accessibility consultant to review editor-facing workflows in the Umbraco backoffice against WCAG standards. Most audited issues have now been resolved and will ship in 17 or 17.1, making day-to-day editing more consistent and predictable, including for users of assistive technologies.

You can track the current accessibility status in our continuously updated Accessibility Conformance Report.

A smaller set of system-level improvements, such as enhanced keyboard movement and support for text spacing, remains in progress and is planned for completion in 2026.

The Content Delivery MCP Server gives LLMs fast, safe, read-only access to your published Umbraco content and media. This means AI tools can understand what’s live on your site, without touching or modifying source data.

Because it works with the Delivery API, AI assistants can retrieve pages, blocks, and media exactly as they appear on the live site, perfect for content-aware features without any editorial risk.

Marketeers can use AI to analyze, search, or understand the site’s content structure, enabling scenarios like:

“Scan all articles and cluster them into topic groups, and suggest a new navigation structure.”

“Generate a structured AEO report for all my pages.”

“Generate a consistency report across descriptions, specs, and imagery for all my products.”

“Scan all media and identify missing alt text or metadata for optimization.”

The read-only surface makes it ideal for content analysis, AI chatbots and assistants, search, and personalisation logic.

Experience the power of load balancing in Umbraco Cloud, distributing website traffic across multiple servers to optimize performance, scalability, and user experience, effortlessly handling high volumes, and scaling with ease.

Umbraco Engage will be enhanced with additional optimizations for Headless implementations. This builds on the headless capabilities already available today and improves how personalization, A/B testing, tracking, and visitor insights can be used across modern frontend frameworks and custom delivery channels.

Analytics are shown directly in the backoffice on both generic and page level. Want to have custom insights with multiple dimensions in it? Simply connect the reporting API to your dashboard application and create the insight you need.

A new Customer Management area will give you a clear overview of all shoppers interacting with your store. You will be able to review customer details, order history, and engagement patterns in one place. This provides better insights into buying behavior, helps you support customers more efficiently and forms a solid foundation for future features.

The extended MCP will make Commerce data more accessible and actionable for marketers, editors, shop owners, and developers. It will support deeper insights into products, customers, orders, and store performance, enabling smoother integrations, better reporting and more efficient day-to-day management of your shop.

Umbraco Forms will gain the ability to use data from logged in Umbraco Members. This makes it possible to prefill fields, personalize form experiences, and link submissions directly to Member profiles. The improvement supports smoother user journeys, reduces friction in form completion, and creates a stronger connection between membership data and form activity.

We currently provide very restricted email functionality in Heartcore in order to limit potential abuse scenarios. We know that email is a crucial part of a modern platform, and intend to re-enable this by allowing you to configure your own SMTP server from which to send messages. Not only will this enhance workflow processes with notifications, but will also allow you to easily send emails on form submissions.

Heartcore media is presently served from an Umbraco domain. For better SEO and to make a site's hosting platform more opaque we will allow customers to add their own domains from which to serve media.

Allows you to schedule automatic upgrades of Umbraco CMS, Forms and Deploy. You will be given a timeframe in with you can schedule the upgrade to ensure better planning and handling of automatic upgrades.

The Visitor Profile will be enriched with properties like name, email address, organization, and custom properties. These properties can be set by a Form submission, an Umbraco Member registration, an Umbraco Commerce order, or by calling the API.

Umbraco Engage will improve support for client side analytics tracking using a CDN based solution. This will provide a consistent and performant way to collect visitor data for analytics, personalization, and A/B testing. The improvements will reduce implementation effort and ensure tracking can be enabled and maintained with minimal complexity.

We are investigating support for block level and property level variations based on Segments. This would make it possible to personalize specific content blocks or individual properties without creating a full Page Variant. Editors could define alternative content for selected segments directly within the existing page, enabling more flexible personalization and faster experimentation while keeping content management simple.

Support for integrating external product review data will make it possible to display ratings and review summaries directly within your store. This allows you to connect trusted third party review platforms and surface social proof where it matters most. The result is a richer product experience that helps customers make informed decisions and increases conversion potential.

A new Product Recommendation feature will make it easy to present relevant products to shoppers based on behavior, popularity, or curated rules. This helps guide customers toward items they are likely to be interested in and supports increased conversion and average order value.