How Much Does a Website Migration Really Cost?

"How much does a website migration cost?" is one of the first questions we get on almost every migration inquiry, and it's also the hardest to answer with a single number. A five-page brochure site moving off Squarespace and a 400-product Shopify store moving to a headless storefront are both "migrations," but they are not remotely the same project. The honest answer is: it depends on what you're moving, how much of it there is, and how much of your current SEO equity you need to protect along the way.

That's not a dodge — it's the same reason most serious migration providers, including us, quote migrations as custom, project-based work rather than a flat package price. What follows is a breakdown of the variables that actually move the number, so you can budget realistically before you request a quote.

Why migration pricing can't be a flat fee

A fixed-price website build works because the deliverable is bounded: a set number of pages, a defined feature list, a known amount of new content. A migration is different. The "content" already exists, but its condition is unknown until someone actually audits it — how many pages, how many of those pages have inbound links worth preserving, how clean the underlying data is, whether the current platform exports cleanly or has to be scraped page by page. Two sites with the same page count can require wildly different amounts of engineering time depending on that condition.

This is why our own Migration package is priced as "Custom" rather than listed alongside our fixed Starter, Business, and Premium tiers — the scope has to be assessed first.

The variables that actually move the price

A handful of factors do most of the work in determining what a migration costs.

Content and data volume

A 20-page site and a 2,000-page site are different orders of magnitude of work, even on the same source and destination platforms. Every additional content type — blog posts, product listings, case studies, downloadable resources — adds mapping and validation work.

SEO preservation requirements

If rankings and traffic matter (and for most businesses considering a migration, they do), every old URL that has earned backlinks or search visibility needs a deliberate 301 redirect strategy, not a generic one. Mapping hundreds of old URLs to their new equivalents, then validating each redirect actually resolves, is real engineering time — and skipping it is exactly how businesses lose rankings after a redesign.

Platform complexity

Moving a static brochure site off an old builder is a different project than migrating a WordPress site with custom plugins, or a Shopify store with checkout customizations, subscriptions, or a headless storefront rebuild. The more custom logic baked into the old platform, the more of it has to be understood and replicated.

Third-party integrations

CRMs, payment gateways, booking systems, marketing automation, analytics — each integration on the old site needs to be re-connected on the new one, and some don't have a clean one-to-one equivalent, which means custom work.

Downtime tolerance

A near-zero-downtime cutover, with staged DNS changes and rollback plans, takes more coordination than a migration where a few hours of downtime is acceptable. If uptime during the switch is non-negotiable for your business, budget for that coordination explicitly.

What a realistic migration budget actually covers

A properly scoped migration quote should include, at minimum: a technical audit of the existing site, content and media migration, URL structure mapping and redirect implementation, domain and DNS configuration, and a post-launch support window to catch anything that surfaces once real traffic hits the new site. Our own Migration tier, for example, includes 60 days of post-launch support and up to two review-and-validation rounds specifically because migration issues tend to surface after launch, not during it.

What a migration quote typically does not include — and what's worth clarifying up front with any provider — is a full redesign, new branding, new content creation, or feature additions beyond what already existed on the old site. Bundling "redesign" into "migration" is one of the most common ways a project's cost and timeline balloon past the original estimate.

Hidden costs people forget to budget for

A few costs get missed in early conversations and then show up as surprises later: third-party subscription or license fees that don't transfer automatically, hosting costs during a parallel-run period where both the old and new sites are live, and the cost of content cleanup if the old site's data turns out to be messier than expected once someone actually opens it up. None of these are hidden fees from a good provider — they're just costs that only become visible once the audit happens, which is exactly why an accurate quote can't be given before that audit.

How to get an accurate quote instead of a guess

The only way to turn "it depends" into a real number is a technical audit: someone actually looks at your current site's page count, platform, integrations, and SEO footprint before quoting. Any provider willing to give you a fixed migration price without first auditing what you're migrating is either padding the estimate heavily to cover the unknowns, or hasn't accounted for them at all — both are worse outcomes than a slightly longer initial conversation.

If you're weighing a migration and want a number grounded in your actual site rather than an industry average, our /pricing page outlines what our fixed-price tiers include for comparison, and our team can scope a migration quote directly through /contact once we've looked at what you're moving.