What a Migration Quote Should Include (and the Red Flags)

Once you have decided not to do it yourself, you face a harder problem: three quotes with a ten-fold spread and no obvious way to tell which one is doing the job properly.

Price alone will not tell you, because the cheap quote and the complete one are describing different work using the same word. These are the specific things to look for.

The six lines a complete quote names#

Not implies. Names.

1. A crawl and URL inventory of your live site. Someone has to list every address your site currently serves before anything moves. If this is missing, nobody knows what needs redirecting, including them.

2. A complete 301 redirect map. Every old URL paired with a specific new one. Watch for this appearing as an optional extra or an upsell. That framing tells you it is not in the base price, which means the base price is not a migration.

3. Metadata and structured data carried across. Titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, schema. These are what your pages rank on, and they do not transfer by themselves.

4. A staging build you approve before launch. You should see the new site and be able to ask for changes while the old one is still serving customers.

5. A cutover plan, including rollback. A named quiet hour, DNS TTLs lowered beforehand, and a stated answer to what happens if something goes wrong in the first hour.

6. Post-launch verification with a period attached. Re-crawling the old URL list, confirming redirects resolve, resubmitting sitemaps, then watching search performance. "We monitor afterwards" is not a commitment. "Six weeks" is.

Three questions that sort providers quickly#

Send the same three to everyone quoting. The answers are more revealing than the prices.

"How many URLs does my site have?" A provider who has looked will give you a number or tell you they will crawl it to find out. One who quotes a price without knowing this is guessing at the size of the job, and the guess gets corrected later, at your expense.

"What happens to URLs that cannot map cleanly?" There are always some: a discontinued product, a page that no longer exists, a category being merged. The good answer is specific, something like mapping to the closest genuine equivalent, or letting it return a clean 410 rather than redirecting everything to the homepage. The bad answer is "everything redirects to the homepage", which search engines treat as a soft 404 and which discards the ranking value anyway.

"What do you do in the six weeks after launch?" This separates a delivery from a service. Anyone finished at cutover has handed you the risk along with the site.

The red flags#

A price without a look. The single strongest signal. Migrations are priced by what is actually there.

Redirects as an add-on. The line "301 redirects available as an extra" means the standard package will lose your rankings.

Guaranteed rankings or traffic. Nobody controls search results. An honest commitment covers the work, not the outcome.

Overnight, at standard price. A rebuild can happen overnight. The audit before it and the verification after it cannot. The timeline breakdown covers why compression costs more rather than the same.

Vagueness about losses. Every migration loses something: Wix comments, saved payment methods, data locked in apps without exports. A provider who says "everything transfers" either has not checked or is not telling you.

Hourly billing. In a job made of surprises, hourly moves the cost of every surprise onto you. Fixed price after an audit puts it where it belongs.

When the cheap quote is the right answer#

This is not an argument that expensive is better.

If your site is five brochure pages, you have little organic traffic, and nothing is being sold on it, then a full audit and a six-week monitoring programme is overkill and you should not pay for one. The steps in the Squarespace and Wix guides are genuinely followable, and doing it yourself is a reasonable Saturday.

The mismatch worth avoiding is the opposite one: a cheap quote on a site whose search traffic actually brings in customers. There, the skipped half is exactly the half protecting the thing that pays you.

What to do with the quotes you have#

Line them up against the six items above and mark which are named rather than implied. Send the three questions. The spread usually collapses once you can see which providers are pricing the same job.

If you want to know what the work should cost before you compare, how much a migration costs covers the bands and where the hours go. Our own prices are published rather than quoted on request, which is the only reason a comparison like this is possible from the outside.