Move your Kentico site
to a headless stack.
We move Kentico EMS, Xperience 13 and Xperience by Kentico sites onto DatoCMS or Storyblok. Your URLs and translations carry over, your editors get out from under the Pages app, and your developers stop maintaining a .NET application. If you are on Xperience 13, the clock runs out on 31 December 2026, so the decision is already on your desk.
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Kentico was the all-in-one. Until the all stopped fitting.
Kentico bundled the CMS, marketing automation, e-commerce, and forms into one product, and that was its strength for a long time. Structured, multilingual, .NET-native. It still is most of those things. What matters is which Kentico you are on, because the three products are on very different clocks. Kentico EMS ran out of support years ago. Xperience 13 gets security hotfixes for the rest of 2026 and nothing at all from 1 January 2027. Xperience by Kentico is the healthy one, refreshed monthly with no major-version cliff to plan around, and the reason teams leave it is that they would rather not operate a .NET application at all. This is one path through our wider headless migration practice. We run the same playbook for teams leaving Sitecore and Umbraco.
Xperience 13 is on security hotfixes only for the rest of 2026. From 1 January 2027 Kentico stops all support, maintenance and security repairs. Kentico EMS ran out years before that.
The Page Type catalogue on EMS and Xperience 13 has grown to a point where editors create a new page by guessing, not by choosing.
Custom modules and workflows were written by a partner agency that has rotated through three account managers since.
The Windows hosting line grew with the site and nobody has re-costed it since. EMS and Xperience 13 both need Windows and IIS, so there was never a lever to pull.
Editors hit two different editing surfaces for one page. In Xperience 13 structured content lives on the Content tab and page-builder content on the Page tab, and which one they get was a developer's decision.
Contacts, activities and scoring are still collecting data from a campaign that ended years ago, and nobody has opened the reports since.
The Reality
The platform is not the problem. The accumulated cost of staying on it is. Replatforming separates the content from the suite.
What Survives the Move
Your content and translations come along.
Kentico stores content as a tree of pages with structured fields, which makes a migration predictable. Pages, Page Types, culture variants, references, media all translate to DatoCMS or Storyblok without losing fidelity. The work is all in the platform layer. Your editorial team's content comes across intact.
All your URLs
every page, every culture-prefixed URL, every URL alias. We pull the content tree through whichever API your version actually has. Xperience 13 exposes a REST service, Xperience by Kentico a GraphQL endpoint per headless channel. Either way you get a redirect map covering everything indexed.
Your content
exported through that API or read directly from the database. Page Type fields on EMS and Xperience 13, content types on Xperience by Kentico, translate field by field into the new content model.
Your multilingual content
culture variants and translated fields move into native multi-locale content with hreflang configured from day one.
Your media library
moved from the Media Library to a CDN with proper image processing. The GetMedia and GetImage URLs that EMS and Xperience 13 hand out are mapped to their CDN equivalents through redirects.
Your SEO signals
everything you set in the Settings application under URLs and SEO, plus the per-page Metadata, gets configured server-side in the new stack. Canonical tags, sitemap, robots.txt and structured data come with it.
What Changes
The .NET suite goes away.
Most of what makes a Kentico site expensive to operate is platform plumbing. Page Types, the Pages app, the Forms app, the IIS host, the database behind it. They go away. What replaces them is built around how editors and developers actually want to work.
Page Types
become a small set of well-defined block schemas. We normalize the catalogue rather than copying it. Editors stop scrolling a dropdown to find the right page type.
Page Templates and widgets
become real components, defined once in code and reused. Editors pick a block and drop it in, and it looks the same everywhere it appears.
Custom modules and workflows
either get rebuilt as fields and approval flows in the new CMS, replaced by built-in equivalents, or dropped if nobody uses them anymore.
The Pages app and Forms app
are gone, and with them the switch between two surfaces to manage one thing. Editors get a CMS designed for editors.
The application layer
goes away entirely. On EMS and Xperience 13 that retires Windows and IIS with it. Xperience by Kentico already runs on macOS and Linux, though either way you are still patching a .NET application and a SQL Server database. What ships from a CDN has no runtime to patch.
How It Works
The migration process
Audit and content model
We pull the content tree, walk through every Page Type or content type, every culture variant, every custom module and workflow. Then we design the content model around how your editors actually publish. You approve the model before development starts.
Migrate, translate, rebuild
Content is exported through the Kentico Xperience API or a direct database read and imported into DatoCMS or Storyblok. The frontend is built in Astro, with components replacing Page Templates and widgets. Multilingual content is mapped to native multi-locale fields with hreflang from the first deploy. URL routing is reproduced per culture so old links resolve.
Cutover and 30 days of watching
We launch on a low-traffic window, swap DNS, and monitor Search Console, Analytics, and Core Web Vitals for 30 days. Kentico stays running as a fallback during the watch window. After 30 days you decide whether to keep us on with a subscription or take it from here.
A note on EMS features
Most EMS features are switched on and forgotten.
Contacts, activities, scoring, personas, marketing automation, most of these were configured for a campaign that ended years ago and have been collecting data into a report nobody opens. The ones still earning their place can be replaced with lighter-weight tools that match the rules you actually need. We list every active feature at the audit stage and decide which ones translate, which ones get dropped, and which ones need a small custom service.
Start with an auditPricing
Fixed price, no scope creep
Kentico migrations vary in scope. A 100-page corporate site with two cultures and a clean Page Type catalogue is one thing. A multi-site EMS install with custom modules, workflows, and a decade of Page Type sprawl is another. The ranges below are where typical projects land. Once we scope yours, you get a fixed quote.
Full audit of your Kentico install, modules, and content tree
Content model rebuilt around your editorial workflow
URL map covering culture-prefixed URLs and aliases
Content migration from Xperience API or database export
Frontend in Astro, CMS in DatoCMS or Storyblok
Multilingual with hreflang from day one
30 days of post-launch monitoring
Same team stays accountable for the system
Performance and uptime monitored continuously
Content and component changes handled monthly
All prices are net, excluding applicable VAT.
Who This Is For
Who this is for
This works well if you
Run a Kentico EMS or Xperience 13 site and want off it before support ends on 31 December 2026
Are on Xperience by Kentico, which refreshes monthly with each release supported for at least 12 months, and would rather not run a .NET application and a database at all
Have a multilingual corporate site with culture variants and want translations to feel native
Care about organic traffic and need every URL preserved through the move
Run EMS or Xperience 13 on Windows and IIS, which both require it, and want the hosting stack off the bill
Have EMS online marketing features configured and running that nobody has looked at in years
This is not a fit if you
Use Kentico online marketing or commerce as the core of the business and need that capability replicated. Different scope. Talk to us first
Are already on Xperience by Kentico headless and only need a frontend rebuild. Talk to us, scope is smaller
Run a small brochure site where the cost of migration outweighs the gain
Are not sure yet what the right move is. Start with a Headless Audit
Need a new build from scratch with no legacy content. See Headless Website