Upgrade procedure

PREREQUISITES: Before upgrades, always backup your project and its database. In addition, make sure you are familiar with the API changes for the Sitefinity CMS release you are upgrading to. For more information, see API breaking changes in Sitefinity CMS 11.0. If you are upgrading trough several releases, check the API changes for all releases. For more information, see Reference: API breaking changes in previous releases.

Use the following procedures to upgrade your current version of Sitefinity CMS to any other higher version. 

RECOMMENDATION: We recommend that you always upgrade to the latest version. 
However, you may want to upgrade to any other version. For example, you may want to upgrade from Sitefinity CMS 5.2 to 8.1.

There are two ways to upgrade a Sitefinity CMS project to a later version:

• Using the Project Manager 
  The project manager automatically upgrades your web.config file, adds the new assemblies to the bin folder, and adds references to them.
• Using a NuGet package
  Buy updating the version of Telerik.Sitefinity.All package, you upgrade all Sitefinity CMS related packages in your projects. As of Sitefinity CMS version 11.0 and above, updates to the web.config file are automatically applied.

IMPORTANT: If your project uses NuGet packages, you must not upgrade it using the Project Manager. In this case, if your project is on Sitefinity 7.3 or below upgrade it to Sitefinity CMS 8.0 using the Project Manager, then upgrade it to 8.1 and above using a NuGet package.