When the development team brings up migrating to ASP.NET Core, the instinct for most marketing teams is to nod along and wait for it to be over. It sounds like a backend project. Plumbing work that keeps the lights on but doesn't change anything you actually touch day-to-day.
That instinct is worth reconsidering. The .NET Core migration is, in a lot of ways, a marketing project.
Yes, every page needs to be rebuilt. That's a real investment, but it's also an opportunity. Rebuilding forces you to look at what you actually have: which pages are still earning their keep, which content is optimized for search and generative AI tools, and which pages have accessibility gaps that have been deferred too long. Most organizations never get a clean shot at that kind of strategic audit. This is one.
And what you get on the other side isn't just a cleaner codebase. It's a fundamentally better experience for the people who manage the site. Here's what that actually looks like.
The Editor Finally Shows You What You're Building
If you've built pages in Sitefinity's MVC editor, you have a sense of the experience: a reasonable approximation of the page, but not quite the real thing. The layout comes through, but the finer details (typography, spacing, how images actually render) often required a preview or a publish to see accurately.
The .NET Core editor is a true what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience. You're editing the actual page, live, as it will appear to visitors. Headers look like headers. Images appear at their real size. Layout changes are visible in real time. This isn't a minor usability improvement. It changes how quickly you can build pages and how much confidence you have before you hit publish.
You Can Build Complex Layouts Without a Developer
One of the most practical additions in the .NET Core experience is the Section widget. It lets you create multi-column layouts (side-by-side content, images next to text, two- to six-column grids) directly in the editor. You adjust column widths by dragging, set backgrounds, and control spacing, all without writing CSS or filing a ticket.
On top of that, Section presets let you save approved layouts and reuse them across the site. Your team can build from a library of pre-configured sections rather than starting from scratch every time a new campaign page is needed. That's a real time savings, and it's a built-in guardrail that keeps the site on-brand even when multiple editors are involved.
A Faster Site Ranks Better and Converts Better
Google's Core Web Vitals (the metrics that measure how fast and stable a page feels to a real user) are a direct input into search rankings. Sitefinity's .NET Core renderer is significantly faster than the old MVC stack. For marketers, that's not a technical detail; it's an SEO and conversion rate argument.
If your site has performance issues today, the migration is part of the fix. That's worth factoring into the business case.
Staying on MVC Means Falling Behind
This is the part that doesn't get enough attention: Progress has effectively stopped building new Sitefinity capabilities for the MVC renderer. New form tools, personalization features, editor improvements. They're all .NET Core only.
Staying on MVC isn't a neutral choice. Every quarter you wait is another quarter where organizations on the new stack have access to capabilities you don't. The gap compounds quietly, and by the time it's visible, you're significantly behind.
If your roadmap includes anything that depends on future Sitefinity features (and most do), the migration isn't optional. It's a prerequisite.
The same dynamic is playing out at the platform level. .NET Framework 4.8, the foundation the MVC renderer runs on, is the final version Microsoft plans to release. Security patches will continue, but all new investment from Microsoft has moved to modern .NET. Staying on the old stack isn't just a Sitefinity decision; it's building on a foundation the broader industry has moved past.
The Project Is More Knowable Than It Sounds
"Every page needs to be rebuilt" sounds like an open-ended commitment, and that's where a lot of organizations stall. But Progress has built a tool specifically for this moment: the Sitefinity Migration Analyzer.
You run it against your existing site, and it produces a detailed report: which pages, templates, widgets, and forms exist, which rendering technology each uses, and what the migration complexity looks like for each one. It's not a rough estimate based on gut feel. It's an actual inventory of your site's current state, translated into a concrete picture of what the project entails.
That changes the conversation. Instead of "we'd need to figure out what we even have," you go into planning with a real scope. You can prioritize high-traffic pages, phase the work over time, and make a business case with actual numbers rather than assumptions.
It also opens the door to a gradual rollout. Because Sitefinity supports hybrid rendering (some pages on .NET Core, others still on MVC), you don't have to migrate everything at once. You can move page by page, or section by section, as content gets refreshed. Starting now means you control the pace. Waiting until MVC deprecation is imminent means a rushed cutover under pressure, with far less room to get it right.
The People With the Most to Gain Should Be in the Room
The .NET Core migration tends to start as a developer conversation, but the people with the most to gain from it are the ones managing the site. A better editor, more layout control without developer involvement, faster pages, and access to every feature Progress ships from here forward. Those are marketing outcomes, not just technical ones.
The project is real. The rebuild is real. But so is the cost of waiting.
The cost of waiting is real.
Starting now means you control the pace. Waiting until MVC deprecation is imminent means a rushed cutover under pressure. We'll help you scope it before either becomes urgent.
Talk to us about your migration arrow_forwardKevin Reed is Principal Solutions Architect at Springthrough. He spends his days helping marketing teams get more out of their Sitefinity platform, and helping them know when it's time to evolve it.