Prodrive Technologies
From Umbraco 8 to 17, and from standstill to regular releases
Prodrive Technologies develops and manufactures electronics and systems for high-tech markets such as semiconductor, medical, energy and mobility. Its headquarters are in Eindhoven, with further offices in Boston, Suzhou and Tokyo.
The website ran on Umbraco 8, on dedicated hosting with the previous partner. There was no longer an active partnership, so little happened with the site. The design no longer matched the brand, and the structure no longer reflected how Prodrive organises its products and markets.
The question was how to turn a website at a standstill back into a site that marketing and sales could build on.
- From Umbraco 8 on dedicated hosting to Umbraco 17 on Umbraco Cloud
- A new set-up based on three workshops with marketing and sales from five business units
- 16 templates and 20 content blocks, redesigned to the current brand identity
- Forms from Microsoft Dynamics, placed on pages by marketing themselves
- 408 pages translated with AI into Japanese, Korean and Chinese
Why we didn't just update the Umbraco version
The obvious step was an upgrade. Umbraco 8 has not received security updates since February 2025, so a version jump had to happen either way.
But an upgrade only carries over what was already there. The same design, the same structure, the same product pages. Prodrive would be on a new version with a site that still didn't do what it needed to.
So we started with the people who use the site. In three workshops we spoke with the marketing team and with sales managers from five business units. What works in practice, what doesn't, and where do visitors drop off?
The outcome was a more commercial set-up: clearer CTAs, better product pages and forms that land directly in the CRM. Because the stakeholders had been at the table, the design that followed wasn't a presentation. It was the elaboration of their own input.
Rebuilt on Umbraco 17 on Umbraco Cloud, with a new product structure
We started with a content and gap analysis. Which pages and blocks exist, which are used, and what is missing for the new set-up? This resulted in a set of 16 templates and 20 content blocks.
We redesigned those templates and blocks to Prodrive's current brand identity. At the same time, we restructured the online product portfolio. Products are now grouped into ten product categories, with separate entry points for markets and manufacturing services.
The site was rebuilt on Umbraco 17, the latest LTS version, on Umbraco Cloud. That removed the dedicated hosting. Security patches are applied automatically. Version updates are tested in a separate environment before they go live.
Prodrive's marketing team migrated the content themselves, with our support. The structure had changed so much that automated migration would have added little. And it meant the team already knew the new backoffice before launch.
Forms from Microsoft Dynamics, placed in Umbraco
Alongside the new website, Prodrive moved to a new CRM: Microsoft Dynamics. The website has been connected to it since launch.
Marketing creates forms in Dynamics. In Umbraco, content managers use a form picker to choose which form appears on a page. That way marketing can add a request form to a product page without a developer.
When a visitor submits the form, Umbraco sends the data to Dynamics via the API. Marketing manages the fields and layout of each form in one place, the CRM. The website doesn't need to change for it.
Since launch: regular meetings, a backlog and AI translations
After launch, the partnership continued under a service agreement. Every two weeks we meet with the marketing team to set priorities on the backlog together. A release goes live every month.
The biggest addition since then: translations into Japanese, Korean and Chinese. 408 pages have been translated so far, 136 per language. Translations run through Translation Manager in the Umbraco backoffice. The translation itself is done by Claude, the AI model from Anthropic.
Translating a page takes about a minute. It goes into a queue and is then ready for review by [WHO REVIEWS]. The translation only goes live after that review.
[QUOTE, MAX. TWO SENTENCES]
Results
8 → 17
Umbraco version jump, from dedicated hosting to Umbraco Cloud
400+
Translated pages: 136 each in Japanese, Korean and Chinese
± 1 minute
From English page to translation ready for review
1 per month
Release based on the shared backlog
Switching Service
If you're still on Umbraco 8, start with a Platformscan
The same goes if your site has stalled because nobody at your partner works on it any more. The Platformscan tells you within five working days what your current environment can do, what can be kept and roughly what a migration would cost. If the outcome is that an upgrade is enough in your case, you'll hear that too.
Request the Platformscan
