How to Choose the Right Partner for Your Kentico Upgrade

1. Upgrade experience is its own discipline 

A team that's brilliant at greenfield CMS implementations isn't automatically good at upgrades. Kentico Xperience 13 has its own legacy constraints, its own quirks of templating, content modelling, custom modules, and deeply customized projects. Migrating from it is not the same job as building from scratch. Ask candidates how many Kentico Xperience 13 to Xperience by Kentico projects they've actually shipped. Then ask what went wrong on each. 

2. They balance business and technical needs, not just one

A pure technical migration is a lift-and-shift. A great upgrade is a modernization, using the move as the moment to rethink content architecture, simplify what got over-customized, and retire the things nobody uses anymore. The right partner has a foot in both worlds. They'll push back on the marketing team and the dev team, in the same meeting, and somehow leave both happier. 

3. Methodology beats heroics

Discovery, planning, execution, risk mitigation. Boring on a slide. Decisive in practice. The teams that ship cleanly have a methodology they don't improvise around. They know when to do parallel content migration, when to phase modules, and how to handle the fragile bits. Ask to see their playbook. If they don't have one, you're paying to be their first project. 

A related signal worth checking: which partners have built their own accelerators. Kentico's Accelerator Partner Program was designed around net new launches in 6 to 10 weeks, but the deeper read is which partners were willing to put their own money behind a repeatable methodology. That's not a cookie cutter. Design, content, outcomes, all still fully yours. What gets shortened is the boring scaffolding every project repeats anyway. A partner who has built that muscle for new builds tends to apply the same discipline to upgrades. 

4. They think in business KPIs, not features

A CMS replatform isn't a website project. It's an operating layer for revenue, pipeline, and cost to serve. The right partner opens the conversation by asking which numbers move when the platform moves. Time to publish for the marketing team. Conversion on the journeys that actually matter. Cost per campaign. Volume of dev tickets that should have been content edits. Speed of personalisation experiments. Lead quality coming out of the site. 

You can't optimize five of those at once. A consultative partner pushes you to pick the two or three that matter most this year and designs the implementation backwards from there. Content model decisions, integration choices, what gets retired, what gets rebuilt. All of it tied to a number a CFO would recognize. 

A partner who can't connect a content modelling decision to a board-level KPI is a delivery shop, not a strategic one. You probably need both. Make sure you know which one you're hiring, and for which part of the work. 

5. Real ecosystem fluency

A modern DXP doesn't live alone. CRM, marketing automation, analytics, identity, AI tools. Your platform is one node in a larger stack. The right partner has actually integrated with these things before, in production, under load. Composable architecture, in particular, is easy to claim and harder to do. 

6. Ask where AI lives in their delivery model 

Not as a buzzword on a slide. As a line item in the estimate. Code generation for repetitive migration work. Automated content audits and mapping. Test generation. Documentation. Content rewrites at scale. The partners who are honest about this are already pricing some of those reductions into their proposals. The ones who aren't are quietly hoping you don't ask. So ask. What parts of the work are AI assisted today? What does that take off the bill compared to a traditional 2025 estimate? 

And then the harder question. Where does the saving go? If a partner can take a meaningful chunk off a traditional migration using AI, that money doesn't have to disappear from the scope. It can be redirected into the strategic work from point 4: personalization, integrations, the content modelling that actually moves a KPI. The cost out conversation and the value in conversation are the same conversation. Make sure your partner is having both with you. 

A quick tip: Kentico maintains a public Partner Finder where you can filter partners by capability. One of the badges to look for is Upgrade Expert, given to partners who have specifically demonstrated experience and proven results with Kentico Xperience 13 to Xperience by Kentico upgrades. It's not the only criterion that matters, but it's a fast way to skip the partners who'd be learning on your project. 

If I had to compress all six points into one sentence, it would be this: the platform decision is the easy one, but the partner's decision is the one that compounds. Choose accordingly.