Umbraco sits behind a large share of the websites we build, which is why we wanted to set out what this means for the organisations running on it.
It answers a question procurement teams are now asking
ESG has moved a long way up the agenda in tender documents over the last few years. For regulated businesses, and for anyone with a parent company reporting on sustainability, the questions now reach into the supply chain, and the software a company relies on is part of that. When a procurement team asks what you know about the company behind your CMS, an independently audited certification is a strong, simple answer.
It also builds on evidence Umbraco already publishes. The company holds ISO 27001 for information security and puts out an annual impact report covering its environmental and social performance. B Corp certification pulls those threads together under a single, widely recognised standard.
It says something about who stands behind the platform
Umbraco the CMS is open source and free to use. Umbraco the company builds the commercial products around it, funds core development and keeps the release cadence running. Anyone choosing a platform they expect to run for the next decade is also choosing that company, so how it is governed and how it treats the community around it are worth knowing. The certification puts independent verification behind values the Umbraco community has recognised for a long time.
Read together
Certifications tend to land one at a time and get read as separate pieces of news. Taken together, ISO 27001, the annual impact reporting and now B Corp describe a company that has chosen to be open about how it operates and straightforward for procurement teams to evaluate. For anyone who has completed a due diligence questionnaire about a CMS, that is a welcome development.
A vendor's certification covers one layer. Hosting and page weight are the part we can act on directly, which is why we offset double the estimated footprint of every site we host.
Congratulations to everyone at Umbraco. Their full announcement is on the Umbraco blog.