CMS End-of-Support 2026: What it Means for Your Kentico Xperience 13 Website

September 22, 2026 - by Will Payman

If your website runs on Kentico Xperience 13, 2026 is a year worth putting on your radar. Kentico Xperience 13 reaches End of Support on December 31, 2026. It is one of several major CMS and DXP platforms with significant support milestones in 2026, but the specific dates and support policies vary by product and version. Before deciding what to do, it’s important to understand what end-of-support means, what changes, what doesn’t, and what options are available.

Kentico Xperience 13 End-of-Support: The Key Dates

Kentico has announced that Kentico Xperience 13 reaches end-of-support on December 31, 2026. For the rest of the year, it receives only security hotfixes. From January 1, 2027, formal vendor support ends entirely, meaning no further hotfixes, updates, or support tickets.

It’s worth noting that 2026 isn’t unique to Kentico. Drupal 10, Umbraco 13, Sitecore, and Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 are also reaching end-of-support around the same time as Kentico Xperience 13, largely because most vendors ship major versions in similar windows and support them for a comparable number of years before retiring that support. If you’re evaluating your Kentico Xperience 13 site specifically, though, the dates above are the ones that matter most to you.

End-of-Support vs. End-of-Life: What Actually Changes

The distinction here matters more than it might seem. End-of-support is not the same as your site shutting down.

Your Kentico Xperience 13 website will continue to run after December 2026, but operating an unsupported platform introduces additional security, maintenance, compatibility, and operational risk. From January 1, 2027, Kentico will no longer provide security repairs, hotfixes, updates, or technical support for Xperience 13, so organizations continuing to run it will be responsible for managing the associated risks.

Kentico has published its own details on this shift on its upgrade page, which is a useful reference if you want the vendor’s direct guidance alongside this one.

Should You Migrate from Kentico Xperience 13? Weighing Your Options

End-of-support doesn’t automatically mean you need to migrate right away. It does mean the decision is worth making deliberately rather than by default. A few questions are worth working through before you land on an answer:

  • How customized is your current Kentico Xperience 13 implementation, and how much of that would need to be rebuilt on a new version?
  • What’s actually limiting your site or team today: performance, security posture, missing capabilities, cost of maintenance?
  • What would a realistic timeline and budget look like for staying versus moving?

If a move to Xperience by Kentico, the vendor’s current platform, ends up being the right call, Kentico’s own Migration Toolkit is a collection of tools built to migrate content and data from an existing Kentico Xperience 13 project into Xperience by Kentico.

It also offers separate KentiCopilot AI plugins that work alongside the Migration Tool to help accelerate parts of the process, such as code and configuration generation. Together, that tooling can meaningfully shorten what used to be a much heavier lift.

One factor genuinely worth weighing into the timing of that decision: CMS migrations tend to get more expensive and more compressed the closer organizations get to a shared deadline, simply because demand for experienced developers and implementation partners rises across the market at the same time. Starting the evaluation now, well before Q4, leaves more room to plan calmly rather than scramble.

CMS Migration Planning: What a Realistic Timeline Looks Like

If you choose migration, the realistic timeline depends far more on your specific situation than on any single number. It’s shaped by the scale of the site or sites involved (hundreds of pages versus thousands), the number and complexity of integrations, and whether the migration also involves replacing other systems at the same time, such as a CDP, customer portals, apps, commerce, or email and marketing automation platforms.

A contained, single-site migration looks very different from a broader digital ecosystem overhaul, and getting clear on that scope early is what makes an eventual timeline and budget realistic rather than a guess

The planning phase itself doesn’t need to be lengthy. It typically comes down to understanding where you stand today, where you’d want to end up, and what effort that path realistically requires, before committing to a timeline or budget.

Why an Evergreen CMS Platform Changes the Long-Term Equation

Whatever you decide for 2026, it’s worth considering the underlying pattern behind why this deadline exists at all: most CMS platforms operate on a multi-year major-version cycle, which means the same kind of decision tends to resurface every few years.

Platforms built on an evergreen model, like Xperience by Kentico, work differently. Instead of major version jumps every few years, they ship continuous, incremental updates on a rolling basis. That doesn’t just solve the current end-of-support question; it removes the recurring deadline altogether. For organizations weighing where to land next, that’s a meaningful part of the decision, not just a nice-to-have.

Not Sure What’s Right for Your Kentico Xperience 13 Site?

As a Kentico implementation partner, Synoptek works with organizations to evaluate where they stand on Kentico Xperience 13, what their options look like, and whether staying, upgrading, or migrating makes the most sense for their specific setup. If you’d like a second opinion before the end-of-support clock runs down, we’re glad to talk it through.

Talk to Our Digital Experience Team

About the Author

Professional headshot of a man with glasses.

Will Payman

Senior Director of Strategy, CX, Synoptek

Will Payman is Senior Director of Strategy, CX at Synoptek, where he leads digital strategy and analytics for clients across industries, with more than 25 years of experience in digital platforms and customer experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Your website keeps running, but security patches, bug fixes, and vendor support stop. From that point on, your organization is responsible for identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities on its own, and there's no vendor support line to call when something breaks. That gap tends to widen the longer a platform runs unsupported.

No. End-of-support means the vendor stops providing updates and assistance. It doesn't mean the platform stops working. Your site continues operating as before; the risk is what accumulates over time as security gaps go unpatched.

December 31, 2026. Through the rest of 2026, it receives security hotfixes only. From January 1, 2027, formal support ends entirely.

It depends heavily on complexity, anywhere from a few weeks for a simple site to 6-12 months for a large enterprise implementation. A standard migration with content and structured data transfer often takes 3-4 months with the right team and tooling in place.

Not necessarily. End-of-support means your risk profile changes, not that your site stops working. That said, moving sooner rather than later also means gaining what Xperience by Kentico offers beyond simply staying supported, including an evergreen update model that removes this kind of deadline going forward, and built-in AI capabilities for content creation and personalization (Kentico's own take on AI and upgrade strategy covers this in more depth). The right move still depends on your specific setup, budget, and appetite for risk, which is exactly why an early evaluation is worth more than a rushed decision later.