Kentico to Next.js Migration

Kentico 13 End of Support Is Coming — You Need a Plan

Kentico 13 hits end of support in late 2026. That's not some distant deadline you can ignore — it's an active migration window that gets shorter every month. Once support ends, you're running an unpatched .NET CMS with no security updates, no bug fixes, and nobody at Kentico picking up the phone when things break.

Kentico's pitch? Move to Xperience by Kentico, their new SaaS platform. But here's the thing — that's a fundamentally different product. Different architecture, different pricing model, significant vendor lock-in. You're re-platforming either way.

So if you're re-platforming regardless, own the outcome. Migrating from Kentico to Next.js gives you a modern, performant, headless architecture that you actually control.

Why Teams Are Leaving Kentico

The .NET Dependency Chain

Kentico 13 runs on ASP.NET, requires Windows Server hosting (or at minimum IIS), and depends on SQL Server. That's a heavy infrastructure footprint for what is fundamentally a content delivery problem. Your hosting costs reflect this — Windows-based hosting with SQL Server licensing isn't cheap, and it's getting harder to find .NET CMS specialists who actually want to work on legacy Kentico installations.

Xperience by Kentico Isn't an Upgrade — It's a New Product

Let's be clear about what Kentico's actually offering here. Xperience by Kentico is SaaS-only. Your content lives on their infrastructure, under their terms. The page builder, content modeling, and development workflow are all different from Kentico 13. You can't lift-and-shift. You're rebuilding anyway — just into a proprietary platform that trades one form of lock-in for another.

Performance Bottlenecks Are Built In

Kentico 13 serves pages through server-side .NET rendering. Every request hits your application server, queries SQL Server, assembles the page, and sends it down the wire. Caching helps at the margins, but the architecture itself is your ceiling. Lighthouse scores on Kentico sites typically land between 45-65 on mobile, and Time to First Byte regularly exceeds 1.5 seconds under load. Those aren't tuning problems — they're structural ones.

Content Editor Frustration

Kentico's Page Builder works, but it's slow. Editors deal with page refresh cycles, unintuitive widget configurations, and a preview experience that doesn't match production. Staging and workflow approvals exist, but they feel bolted on rather than native to the editing experience.

What Next.js Gives You

Static + Dynamic, Your Choice

Next.js lets you statically generate content pages at build time for near-instant load times, while keeping dynamic routes server-rendered when you actually need fresh data. Your marketing pages, blog posts, and landing pages serve from a global CDN at sub-100ms response times. Interactive features like search, personalization, or authenticated content use server components or API routes.

Headless CMS Freedom

With Next.js, you choose your CMS. Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok, or any headless CMS that fits your content model. Your content is API-first, portable, and not locked to any single vendor. Want to switch CMS providers down the road? Your frontend stays intact.

Modern Developer Experience

React components, TypeScript, hot module replacement, deployment on Vercel or any Node.js host. Your team works with the most widely used frontend framework in the world, with access to a massive ecosystem of packages and tooling. Recruiting developers who actually want to work on your stack gets dramatically easier.

Built-In Preview and Staging

Next.js Draft Mode replaces Kentico's staging workflow. Editors preview unpublished content in the actual production layout, on the actual production URL, with a simple toggle. No separate staging server, no deployment pipeline for previews — it just works.

Our Kentico to Next.js Migration Process

Phase 1: Content Audit and Data Extraction (Weeks 1-3)

We start by mapping every Kentico page type, custom table, and content relationship in your installation. Kentico 13 exposes content through its REST API, but for complex migrations we often go directly to SQL Server exports — that's where you find the full picture of page type fields, attachment metadata, workflow states, and multilingual content variants that the API doesn't always surface cleanly.

The output is a complete content inventory: what migrates as-is, what needs restructuring, and what gets archived.

Phase 2: Headless CMS Architecture (Weeks 2-4)

Your Kentico page types become content models in your chosen headless CMS. We map fields, preserve relationships, and design the schema for editorial efficiency — not just technical accuracy. Rich text fields get cleaned and converted. Media libraries migrate to cloud-native asset management. Taxonomy structures transfer intact.

This phase overlaps with Phase 1 intentionally. As we audit, we architect.

Phase 3: Next.js Frontend Build (Weeks 3-8)

We rebuild your frontend in Next.js with component-driven architecture. Every Kentico widget and page template becomes a React component. We implement:

• Static generation for content pages
• Server components for dynamic sections
• Draft Mode for editorial preview
• Incremental Static Regeneration for content updates without full rebuilds
• Image optimization via Next.js Image component (replacing Kentico's media handling)

Phase 4: SEO Preservation (Weeks 6-9)

This is non-negotiable. We build a complete URL redirect map covering every indexed page. If your Kentico URLs use patterns like /products/category/item.aspx or custom route handlers, we map each one to the new clean URL structure with 301 redirects.

We preserve:

• All existing URL equity through redirect mapping
• Meta titles, descriptions, and Open Graph data
• Structured data (Schema.org markup)
• XML sitemaps with proper lastmod dates
• Canonical URLs and hreflang tags for multilingual sites
• Internal link structures

We monitor Google Search Console throughout the migration window and for 90 days post-launch to catch indexing issues immediately.

Phase 5: QA, Launch, and Monitoring (Weeks 8-10)

Full cross-browser testing, performance benchmarking, and content verification before cutover. We run parallel environments during the transition period and use feature flags for a zero-downtime launch.

Timeline and Investment

A typical Kentico to Next.js migration runs 8-14 weeks depending on content volume, multilingual requirements, and custom functionality complexity.

Site Complexity	Timeline	Investment
Marketing site (50-200 pages)	8-10 weeks	$25,000-$45,000
Mid-market (200-1,000 pages, multilingual)	10-12 weeks	$45,000-$75,000
Enterprise (1,000+ pages, integrations)	12-16 weeks	$75,000-$120,000+

Starting in 2026 gives you comfortable runway for testing, training, and a clean transition. Waiting until later in 2026 puts you in emergency mode with far fewer good options.

Don't Wait for the Deadline

Every month you delay narrows your options. Agencies and developers who specialize in Kentico migrations will be booked solid as the deadline gets closer. The teams that start now get better timelines, better pricing, and better outcomes.

For a detailed technical comparison, see our Kentico vs Next.js breakdown. To learn more about what we build with Next.js, visit our Next.js development capabilities.