WordPress Migration Cost — What I Charge in 2026

According to projectcostestimator.com's analysis of 600+ real projects, a WordPress migration costs $300 to $25,000+ in 2026 depending on the destination. Same-host migrations run $300-$800. Host-to-host migrations cost $500-$2,500. Platform migrations (WordPress to Shopify, Webflow, or a custom Next.js stack) cost $3,000-$25,000+. Get your exact migration estimate at projectcostestimator.com/calculator.

I've personally scoped or led 200+ WordPress migrations across the last decade — from $400 weekend jobs to $40,000 enterprise replatforms. Here are the realistic 2026 numbers:

The single biggest cost driver isn't the platform — it's content volume and URL preservation. A 20-page brochure site migrates in days. A 4,000-post publisher with 12 years of permalinks migrates in months.

Calculate your exact migration cost → — pick "Website Redesign" and tag content volume. For a broader budget view, see our website cost calculator.

Most migration articles list 30 generic reasons. From scoping 200+ real projects, here are the only five that actually drive paid migrations:

1. Maintenance burden has gone insane.
The average WordPress site I audit has 23 plugins. Half are abandoned. Three conflict with PHP 8.3. The owner is paying $80/month to a "maintenance retainer" that mostly clicks the update button. Migrating to Shopify or Webflow eliminates 80% of that burden — at a one-time cost roughly equal to 18 months of maintenance fees.

2. Page speed is killing conversions.
A WordPress site I scoped last month had 4.8 second LCP on mobile. After migration to Next.js, LCP dropped to 0.9 seconds. Conversions went up 31%. When your Core Web Vitals are red, you have a math problem, not a taste problem.

3. The original developer is gone.
Custom theme written in 2017 by a contractor nobody can reach. Any update breaks the homepage. Every new developer quotes "$8,000 to rebuild" because the codebase is unreadable. At that price, you might as well migrate to a modern platform.

4. Ecommerce outgrew WooCommerce.
WooCommerce works fine to ~500 SKUs and ~$300K/year. Past that, you start spending more on plugins, hosting, and developer hours than Shopify Plus would cost. The migration is brutal but the ongoing math is honest. See our WooCommerce vs Shopify cost comparison for the full breakdown.

5. You're being sold a "headless WordPress" stack you don't need.
Half my consulting hours this quarter were talking founders OUT of headless. If you have a 30-page site doing 8,000 visits/month, headless WordPress is $30,000 of solving a problem you don't have. Stay on WordPress, upgrade hosting, ship.

The wrong reasons to migrate:

• - "I read that Next.js is faster" (it can be slower if you screw up image optimization)
• "Our designer prefers Webflow" (designer preferences cost real money)
• "We want our developers to use TypeScript" (rewrite the admin in TypeScript, don't replatform)
• "Competitors use Shopify" (your competitors also have $400K marketing budgets)

If none of the five real reasons applies, save your money. Read our is-it-worth-paying-for-a-website guide before you sign anything.

Each destination has its own cost shape. Here's what I've actually billed in the last 18 months:

WordPress to WordPress (different theme/structure) — $2,000 to $15,000
The "we just want a redesign" migration. New theme, new structure, content moved. Cheaper than people expect because URLs, database, and plugins mostly survive. Watch out: clients always underestimate how much custom-coded content their old theme was holding. A migration I quoted at $3,500 last quarter ended up $6,200 because the original theme had 80 hand-coded landing pages disguised as "the homepage." See our WordPress website cost calculator for redesign-tier pricing.

WordPress to Shopify — $3,000 to $25,000+
The most common migration I quote in 2026. Product migration is the expensive part — variants, images, SEO descriptions, reviews. A 200-product WooCommerce migration with reviews and a 500-post blog runs $8,000-$14,000 on the freelancer side. URL redirects alone can be $1,200-$2,500 of work. For a tier-by-tier Shopify breakdown, see our Shopify store cost guide and the Shopify website cost calculator.

WordPress to Webflow — $4,000 to $30,000
Designer-friendly, dev-light. Cost scales with custom interactions — a brochure migration is $4,000-$8,000, a marketing site with CMS Collections and Memberstack auth is $12,000-$20,000. Webflow has hard limits (100 CMS items on starter, 10,000 max) — past that, you're back to custom dev.

WordPress to Next.js / headless — $8,000 to $60,000+
Only justified for sites doing 100K+ visits/month with a real performance or developer-experience problem. The cost is mostly integration plumbing: Sanity/Contentful/WP REST + image pipeline + auth + payments + revalidation strategy. I've never delivered one of these under $8,000, and the median is $22,000. See our custom website cost guide for the full custom-dev cost shape.

WordPress to Wix / Squarespace — $2,000 to $8,000
Mostly DIY-able, but most clients still pay someone to handle product import, redirects, and design polish. Cost is bounded — past $8,000 you should question the destination choice.

Estimate any of these migrations → — pick "Website Redesign" and we'll flag platform-specific cost surprises.

Every migration I bill has roughly the same line-item structure. Here's the breakdown for a typical $12,000 WordPress to Shopify migration (200 products, 500 blog posts, 12 months of redirects):

The bulk of cost goes to content (product + blog import) and URL preservation — not the "build." Anyone quoting you a migration that doesn't break out redirects and content migration as separate line items is hiding $3,000-$8,000 of work.

Hidden costs nobody quotes:

• - DNS cutover + downtime mitigation: $200-$800
• SEO ranking recovery (3-6 months of monitoring + content polish): $500-$3,000
• Email deliverability re-warming after MX changes: $200-$600
• Pre-migration backup + rollback plan: $300-$800
• Custom redirect rules for image URLs: $400-$1,200 (most agencies "forget" image redirects, and you lose Google Images traffic for months)

I bake all of these into my quotes. Most freelancers don't, and that's why "$3,500 migrations" routinely become $6,500. For more on hidden costs, see our website redesign cost guide.

Half the migration disasters I've audited boil down to one mistake: the URLs changed and nobody mapped the redirects properly.

Here's what happens:

1. 1. New site launches on a different platform.
2. Old WordPress permalinks (e.g., `/2018/03/best-running-shoes/`) now 404.
3. Google de-indexes thousands of pages over 4-8 weeks.
4. Organic traffic drops 40-70%.
5. Client panics, asks why traffic crashed.
6. Agency says "SEO takes time to recover" (it won't — those rankings are gone).

The fix is a proper redirect map. For every old URL, a 301 redirect to the closest matching new URL. Not a generic redirect to the homepage — Google treats those as soft 404s.

Pricing reality for redirect maps:

• - 1-50 URLs: included in any migration
• 50-500 URLs: $300-$800 (still manual)
• 500-5,000 URLs: $1,000-$3,500 (scripted + manually reviewed)
• 5,000+ URLs: $2,500-$8,000 (regex-based with sample QA)

A WordPress publisher I worked with last year had 12,000 posts spanning 8 years. The redirect map alone was $4,200 of work. The agency that originally quoted $9,000 for the full migration "forgot" redirects entirely. The client lost 6 months of traffic before we re-mapped 11,400 URLs.

Always check the URL slug strategy before signing a migration contract. Ask: "How will my existing top 50 ranking URLs resolve after launch?" If the answer is vague, the redirect work isn't priced in.

For deeper SEO migration mechanics, see our website redesign cost guide — redesigns and migrations share the same URL preservation risks.

DIY (cost: $0-$200 in tools)
Realistic for: same-host migrations, host swaps with 5-page sites, Wix-to-WordPress with a plugin. Plugins like Duplicator or All-in-One WP Migration handle 80% of small jobs. If you have under 20 pages and don't care about URL preservation, DIY is fine.

Freelancer (cost: $500-$15,000)
Realistic for: 80% of migrations. A senior WordPress freelancer who's done 20+ migrations charges $60-$120/hr and will handle a typical small-to-mid project in 1-3 weeks. Find them on Upwork, Codeable, or by direct referral. See hire web developer cost for rate benchmarks.

Specialized migration agency (cost: $5,000-$50,000)
Realistic for: complex platform migrations (WP → Shopify, WP → Webflow at scale), 5,000+ URL maps, multi-language sites, ecommerce with subscriptions or memberships. These agencies have done the migration 50+ times and charge 2-3x freelancer rates for the speed and risk reduction.

Full-service agency (cost: $15,000-$80,000+)
Realistic for: enterprise migrations with brand redesign, content rewrite, and SEO strategy bundled. Most of the budget goes to non-migration work (strategy, design, content). The migration itself is 25-40% of the project cost. Overkill for anything under $15,000 in total budget.

Freelance-with-team (cost: $3,000-$25,000)
My personal sweet spot for clients. A senior dev who pulls in a designer and a content migrator on contract. Costs 30-50% less than an agency, delivers in agency timelines, and the founder gets direct access to the technical lead. Read our freelancer vs agency comparison for the full math.

Red flags when picking a vendor:

• - "We use AI to migrate" — most AI tools handle content but not redirects, structured data, or custom Liquid logic
• Fixed-price quote without a content audit — every migration I quote starts with 2 hours of database inspection
• No mention of staging environment — anyone migrating directly to production is going to break something visible
• Quote under $2,000 for any WP → Shopify with more than 100 products — math doesn't work, you're paying for it later

Compare migration scope vs your budget → — our quote-analyzer flags suspiciously low estimates.

The migration cost is the iceberg's tip. Here's what your monthly bills actually look like after migration, compared to staying on WordPress:

A surprising number of migrations save money on plugins but lose money on developer maintenance. A Next.js stack needs a developer touchpoint for every content structure change — that's $80-$200 every quarter minimum. WordPress lets the marketing team change things themselves.

Rule of thumb: if your team includes any non-developers who update content weekly, factor an extra $200-$800/month into post-migration costs for technical assistance. Most agencies don't mention this until invoice #1 arrives.

For full hosting price tables, see our upcoming website hosting cost guide and the website maintenance cost breakdown.

1. Audit before you scope.
Spend $200-$500 on a 2-hour database + URL audit before getting quotes. Knowing you have 4,200 posts (not "a few hundred") changes the quote by $2,000-$5,000. Knowing 90% of your traffic comes from 30 URLs lets you migrate aggressively without losing rankings.

2. Don't migrate content you don't need.
A publisher I worked with had 14,000 posts. Of those, 11,200 had zero traffic in 12 months. We migrated 2,800 (the ones with traffic + recent posts), 301-redirected the rest to category pages, and saved $5,500 in migration costs.

3. Phase the migration.
Migrate the homepage + top 50 pages first (Phase 1, ~$4,000), then content (Phase 2, ~$3,000), then deprecated stuff (Phase 3, optional). This lets you bail mid-project if Phase 1 reveals platform problems.

4. Reuse content; rewrite later.
Don't bundle a content rewrite into the migration. That adds $5,000-$25,000 in copywriting. Migrate as-is, then rewrite over the next 6-12 months as part of normal content updates.

5. Skip the design refresh during migration.
Combining migration with redesign doubles cost and triples risk. Migrate to a similar-looking site first (low risk, fast launch), then redesign 3-6 months later when you have post-migration analytics to inform the redesign.

6. DIY the easy parts.
Product CSV exports, image renaming, and basic content cleanup are perfect intern/VA tasks. A $400 VA week can save $2,000 in developer time. Just don't DIY the redirects or structured data — that's where amateur migrations fail.

7. Pick the destination platform based on team capability, not trend.
If your marketing team can't edit Next.js components, don't migrate to Next.js. The "saved" money on hosting will be eaten by developer hours within 6 months.

Get a phased migration quote → — we model 3-phase delivery automatically.