Website Migration Cost Calculator
What a migration costs depends far less on how big your site is than on what your current platform will let you take with you. Tell us where you are moving from and roughly how much content there is, and this will give you a complexity rating, an effort estimate and a cost range.
What this checks
Platform-aware Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Shopify, Joomla, Drupal, older WordPress and static HTML are each modelled separately.
Zoom and text size a viewport tag that disables pinch zoom, body text below the readable floor, and tap targets too small to hit reliably.
Frames and media iframes with no title — maps and video embeds, usually — and video or audio set to autoplay without being muted.
What exports and what does not: a straight account of what your platform will actually hand over.
Content volume: pages, posts, and products, with bulk work priced as bulk work.
Redirect mapping is the SEO preservation work that determines whether anyone notices the move.
Multilingual language relationships and hreflang, which cost more than the extra pages do.
Design decisions: match the current look, tidy it, or redesign properly — each priced differently.
Complexity rating: low, medium, or high, based on what can realistically go wrong.
Timeline a realistic delivery window, including testing and launch.
The export question decides everything else
Before anything else, find out what your current platform will give you. This single answer changes the cost of a migration by a factor of three or more, and it is the thing people discover last.
Wix is the extreme case: there is no full site export, so a Wix migration means recreating pages by hand. Squarespace gives you a WordPress XML file that carries blog posts and not much else. Shopify hands over a clean product CSV that imports into WooCommerce well, but customers, orders, and anything an app stored are a different problem. WordPress to WordPress is the easy case, and even then the old theme and its abandoned plugins are where the hours go.
None of this is a reason not to move. It is a reason to know what you are buying before you agree a price.
Redirects are the whole ballgame
If you take one thing from this page: every URL on the old site needs a 301 redirect to its equivalent on the new one, mapped before launch and tested after it.
Search engines have spent years learning your URLs. Other websites link to them. People have bookmarked them. Change the platform without mapping them and every one of those becomes a 404 on launch day — the rankings go, the referral traffic goes, and the recovery takes months of work that costs considerably more than the mapping would have.
This is also the line item most likely to be quietly missing from a cheap quote. Ask about it explicitly, and ask who is responsible for checking it in the week after launch.
What a migration should actually include
A migration is not finished when the content is on the new platform. These are the parts that separate a move nobody notices from one that costs you a quarter.
- A full crawl of the old site first, so there is a definitive list of every URL that exists — including the ones nobody remembers publishing.
- Content, images and metadata moved with formatting and alt text intact, not pasted in as plain text.
- A redirect map, applied and tested, covering every old URL including old image paths.
- Forms rebuilt and actually submitted end to end, with someone confirming the email arrives.
- Analytics and conversion tracking carried across, so the before and after can be compared.
- DNS, SSL and email checked before the switch, because a migration that breaks email is the one people remember.
- A staging site signed off before anything points at the new server, and a rollback plan if it does not go to plan.
- Search Console checked daily for the first fortnight, because that is where the problems show up first.
Should you redesign at the same time?
Usually yes, and the reason is practical rather than aesthetic: you are already rebuilding every page, so redesigning them costs a fraction of what it would as a separate project later.
The argument against is diagnostic. If you change the platform and the design at once and traffic drops, it is much harder to work out which change caused it. For a site with significant search traffic and a lot to lose, migrating first and redesigning a few months later is the cautious sequence, and sometimes the right one.
For most small business sites, where the design is the reason for moving in the first place, doing both at once is the sensible economics.
What this calculator cannot know
It has not seen your site. It does not know whether your pages share three layouts or forty, whether your product data is clean, whether your forms feed into a CRM nobody has the login for, or whether the person who built the original site left anything documented.
Content volume is also a rough guide rather than a driver — a hundred near-identical blog posts are a script, and ten complex interactive pages are a fortnight. The model assumes an ordinary mix.
Use the range to sanity-check a quote, not to hold anyone to a price. Anyone quoting a migration without looking at the current site first is guessing too.
Questions people ask
How much does it cost to move from Wix to WordPress?
More than moving from almost anywhere else of the same size, because Wix provides no site export. Pages have to be rebuilt rather than imported, so the cost scales with page count far more steeply. A small Wix site is still an affordable project; a fifty-page Wix site is a real one.
Will I lose my Google rankings when I migrate?
Not if the redirects are done properly. A well-executed migration with a complete 301 map typically shows a small dip for two to four weeks and then recovers, sometimes higher than before if the new site is faster. A migration without redirects loses most of its search traffic and can take six months or more to get back — that is the difference the redirect line item buys you.
Can I move my Shopify store to WooCommerce?
Yes. Products, variants and images export as CSV and import into WooCommerce reasonably cleanly. The work is in everything around them: customer accounts, order history, subscriptions, discount rules, shipping zones, tax configuration and any Shopify app that was holding data. Budget for rebuilding and retesting checkout from scratch rather than migrating it.
How long does a website migration take?
A small brochure site is a week or two. A content-heavy site with redirects is typically three to six weeks. A shop is longer, because checkout, payments and shipping all have to be tested properly before anyone relies on them. The calculator gives an estimate for your scope, and it includes testing time rather than pretending launch day is the end.
Will my website go down during the migration?
It should not. The new site is built on staging while the old one stays live, and the switch is a DNS change that takes minutes. What does need care is email — if your email runs on the same domain, the DNS records for it have to be carried across deliberately, and that is the single most common way a migration goes visibly wrong.
Should I keep my old URLs exactly as they are?
Where you can, yes — an unchanged URL needs no redirect and carries no risk. Change them only where the old structure is genuinely bad, and then map every one. "While we are at it" URL restructuring is the most common self-inflicted wound in a migration.
Is this figure a quote?
No. It is a model, and it says what it assumes. A real figure needs someone to look at the site you are moving and find out what can be exported, which is usually an hour's work and worth doing before you commit to anything.
Thinking about moving?
Send us the address of the site you want to move and we will tell you what can actually be exported, what has to be rebuilt, and what it would cost — before you commit to anything.
