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What Does a WordPress Website Migration Really Cost?
Gabriel Abussafi
Founder
Your Digital Growth Partner
From strategy and design to development and launch, we build digital experiences that move your business forward.
The same WordPress migration can be quoted at a few hundred dollars and at tens of thousands, and both quotes can be honest. The confusion comes from one mistake: thinking “migration” is one job. It isn’t. The cheap quote and the expensive one are pricing two different jobs that share a name.
So before any numbers, the most useful thing I can tell you is this: price your migration as a rebuild, not a content transfer. That one framing protects you from the most expensive mistake in the whole process, which is paying a little to lose a lot.
Here’s what drives the cost, what each route really looks like, and how to budget for a migration that protects the asset instead of quietly breaking it.
Why “Migration Cost” Is the Wrong Question
When someone asks what a migration costs, they usually picture a content transfer: copy the pages and posts to the new platform, point the domain, done. That’s the cheap version. For a five-page brochure site with no traffic, it’s fine.
It’s almost never what a funded company needs. What they need is a site that:
Looks like it belongs to a company at their stage
Removes the bottleneck that made them want to leave WordPress
Keeps every bit of organic traffic and ranking authority the old site earned
Is built so their own team can edit and extend it afterward
That’s not a transfer. It’s a rebuild with migration discipline on top, and it’s priced like one, because it’s a different amount of work.
The danger is that both look the same on a proposal until you check what’s included. The cheap quote skips the design, the redirect map, the SEO work and the QA. You find out three weeks after launch, when traffic is down a third and the savings are gone several times over.
What Actually Drives Migration Cost
Six factors explain almost the whole range. Know them and you can read any quote.
1. Page count and content volume. A 10-page marketing site and a 200-page site with a 500-post blog are different projects. More pages means more design, more rebuild and more URLs to map.
2. Redesign or straight port. Recreating the current design on a new platform costs less than redesigning on the way. But the migration is the best moment you’ll get to fix a design that’s holding you back, since you’re rebuilding everything anyway. Most teams leaving WordPress want the redesign, because the design ceiling is part of why they’re leaving.
3. Functional complexity. Memberships, gated content, complex forms, CRM and marketing automation, calculators, multiple languages. Each one adds scope.
4. CMS structure. Moving a large, structured library (several content types, deep taxonomies, hundreds of items) takes real work to map and move cleanly.
5. SEO preservation. This is the line cheap quotes delete first, and it’s the one that protects your traffic: the audit, the full 301 redirect map, on-page SEO reproduced and post-launch monitoring. If you have traffic worth keeping, it isn’t optional.
6. Who does the work. A freelancer, a productized subscription and a senior studio price differently and deliver differently.
The Three Ways to Migrate, and What Each Costs
Option 1: Do it yourself
If you’re technical, comfortable in the new platform and your site is small, you can do it yourself. Hard costs are the platform plan and the domain. The real cost is your time and the risk. DIY migrations are where the worst SEO losses happen, because redirects and on-page details are exactly the tedious work an untrained person skips. Fine for a small site with little to lose. Risky for anything that matters to revenue.
Option 2: Hire a freelancer
Freelance web designers charge anywhere from roughly $20 to $75 an hour, depending on skill. For a simple marketing site, a good freelancer is a reasonable middle path. The trade-offs: one person rarely covers design, development and SEO at a senior level, capacity is limited, and SEO discipline depends entirely on that one person caring about it. The bottom of the freelance market is where you find “I’ll migrate your site for a few hundred dollars”, which is the content-transfer trap wearing a different hat.
Option 3: Work with a studio or agency
This is where the range widens, because “agency” covers everything from productized subscriptions to senior studios.
Productized “ask for anything” subscriptions work through a task queue, one request at a time. They’re good for steady small updates. They’re not built for a migration that needs senior strategy and several workstreams running in parallel.
A senior studio prices the migration as the rebuild it actually is: redesign plus migration, full SEO preservation, a design system your team can extend, and the QA and monitoring that protect the launch. It’s a project, not a monthly fee. It costs the most up front and the least once you count the traffic a cheap migration loses.
Where we sit: GG Studio doesn’t do content transfers. When we migrate a site, it includes a real audit, a complete redirect map, a redesign when the brief calls for it, and monitoring after launch. Our Webflow to Framer migration service is built on one idea: migrations fail in two places, lost rankings and a site that looks the same on a new platform. We handle the technical move and fix the conversion problems while the site is open on the table. I won’t put our price in a blog post, because scope drives it. On a call you get a scoped number, not a range.
Don’t Forget the Ongoing Platform Cost
The migration is a one-time project. The platform is a recurring cost, so factor it in.
Framer is the leaner option for most marketing sites. The free plan publishes only to a Framer subdomain. Basic is $10/month billed yearly. The plan most companies need is Pro at $30/month billed yearly, with 10 CMS collections, redirects and staging. Editors are billed separately at $20/month each, or $10/month for content-only editors, and Framer Experts get free editor access on client projects.
Webflow bills a site plan and workspace seats separately. Basic is $15/month billed yearly with no CMS. The plan most content-driven B2B sites need is Premium at $25/month billed yearly. Full seats are $39/month and limited seats $15/month. Above that sits the Team plan at $2,500/month on an annual contract.
Neither includes your domain, which runs about $10 to $20 a year.
(Prices checked on framer.com and webflow.com in October 2026.)
The takeaway: the subscription is small change next to the migration itself. A few hundred dollars a year against a rebuild that decides whether your site works for the next several years. Don’t let the recurring number distract you. The detail is in our Framer pricing and Webflow pricing guides.
The Real Cost Is the Migration You Don’t Pay For
The thing that costs companies the most never shows up on a quote.
The most expensive migration is the cheap one that loses your traffic. If organic search drives a real share of your pipeline, a migration that drops your rankings is a revenue event, not a line item. Teams “save” a few thousand dollars on a budget migration and then spend months, and far more money, trying to win back what they lost in a weekend.
Migrations punish missing discipline, and discipline is exactly what gets cut to hit a low price. When you pay for a proper migration, a big part of what you’re buying is the absence of that disaster.
So price it as a rebuild. Budget for the design, the redirects, the SEO work and the monitoring. The number will be higher than the transfer quote, and it will be the cheapest version of this project you ever pay for.
How to Budget for Your Migration
Define the scope honestly. Page count, redesign or port, functional complexity, content volume. This decides everything.
Make SEO preservation a named deliverable. If a quote doesn’t mention the audit, the redirect map and on-page reproduction, it’s a transfer. Ask for it or walk away.
Include the platform subscription, a few hundred dollars a year, but don’t let it drive the decision.
Weigh lost traffic against what the cheap quote saves. For most funded companies, doing it properly wins by a wide margin.
Match the partner to the stakes. DIY or a budget freelancer for low-stakes sites. A senior studio when traffic and brand are on the line.
For the full process behind the pricing, read how to migrate from WordPress without losing SEO and the redesign and migration checklist. If you’re still choosing a platform, the Webflow or Framer decision guide will help.
GG Studio redesigns and migrates websites for funded B2B SaaS and AI startups, priced as the rebuilds they are, with SEO protection from the first audit. If you want a scoped number for your migration instead of a transfer quote that costs you later, book a call:
