How Much Does a Website Migration Cost?

Ask three providers what it costs to move the same site and you can get $200, $1,200 and $6,000. That spread is not a market failure. They are pricing three different jobs and calling all of them a migration.

Here is what the work actually consists of, what each part costs, and how to tell which job you are being quoted for.

The bands, for a small business site#

These are the ranges the work genuinely lands in for a site up to roughly 30 pages or 500 products.

Moving to WordPress: about $500 to $1,000. A platform rebuild. Theme configured, pages and blog archive moved, forms rebuilt, metadata carried across. The cheapest complete option, and it needs routine maintenance afterwards.

Moving a store to Shopify: about $1,500 to $2,200. Priced by catalogue rather than page count, because catalogue size drives the work. Products with variants, customers, order history, payment and shipping configuration, and a checkout tested end to end. Every one of those is its own failure domain.

A hand-built custom site: about $2,500 to $3,500. Written rather than configured. Costs most upfront and least to run, since static hosting is usually free.

Above those sizes the honest answer is that it gets quoted individually. An 80-page site with three languages and a members area is not a tier, it is a project.

Where the money actually goes#

The instinct is that you are paying for the rebuild. You are mostly not.

The audit, roughly 15%. Crawling the live site, inventorying every URL, exporting Search Console, finding what cannot transfer. Nothing is built during this and it determines whether the rest goes smoothly.

The rebuild, roughly 50%. The visible part. Scales with page count more than anything else.

The redirect map, roughly 15%. Every old address paired with its new home. Cheap to do, expensive to discover you skipped.

Verification and monitoring, roughly 20%. Re-crawling the old URL list, confirming redirects resolve, checking nothing is blocked, then watching search performance for weeks.

A quote that covers only the middle band is not a cheaper migration. It is a rebuild, sold as a migration, with your search traffic carrying the difference.

What actually moves the price#

Volume, obviously: pages, products, blog archive depth. This is the main lever and it is roughly linear once setup costs amortise.

Subscriptions and recurring billing. If a meaningful share of your revenue recurs, that has to be re-established with customers on the new platform. It is a communication project as much as a technical one, and it is the single biggest complexity multiplier.

Multi-currency, multi-region tax, memberships. Each adds a configuration surface with its own way of going wrong.

Data trapped in apps. Reviews, loyalty points, booking history. If the app has no export, the honest options are rebuild, abandon, or stay. Anyone who promises to move it without checking has not checked.

Rush. Genuine rush costs more because the protective phases still happen, just compressed and out of hours. Rush that costs the same as standard usually means those phases were deleted.

Worth knowing what does not add much: a design refresh during the move. The pages are being rebuilt anyway, so a like-for-like reproduction and a refresh land at the same tier for most sites.

Doing it yourself#

The cash cost is zero and the time cost is real: roughly 20 to 40 hours for a small site, more if the platform resists. Whether that is a good trade depends on two things.

Your hourly value. Multiply it out honestly, including the evenings.

Whether search traffic matters to you. This is the bigger factor. The redirect map is the step self-migrations skip most, and it is the one that quietly costs traffic for months rather than failing loudly on day one.

For a brochure site with a handful of pages and little organic traffic, doing it yourself is genuinely sensible, and the free redirect generator covers the fiddliest part. For a site where organic search brings in customers, the arithmetic usually flips, and the tools-versus-service comparison maps exactly which parts a paid tool covers and which stay yours.

Reading the number you are given#

The useful question is not "how much" but "for what". A quote that names the audit, the redirect map and the post-launch verification is pricing the whole job. One that quotes a number without having looked at your live site is guessing, and the guess will be corrected later at your expense.

What a migration quote should include breaks down the specific lines to look for and the phrasing that signals corners being cut.

Our own prices are published in full rather than quoted on request, and the quote builder shows you the tier price and a delivery date as you answer four questions. That is not generosity; a price you can check against the work is the only way this comparison is possible at all.