How Much Does a WordPress Website Migration Cost?

Here's a number that should tell you something: the same WordPress migration can be quoted at $500 and at $40,000, and both quotes can be honest. I've watched founders get whiplash from that range, and the confusion is understandable. But it comes from a single misunderstanding — that "migration" is one thing. It isn't. The $500 quote and the $40,000 quote are pricing two completely different jobs that happen to share a name.

So before we talk numbers, the most important thing I can tell you is this: price your migration as a rebuild, not a content transfer. That framing alone will save you from the most expensive mistake in this entire process — paying a little to lose a lot.

Let me explain what actually drives the cost, what the realistic ranges are in 2026, and how to budget for a migration that protects the asset instead of quietly destroying it.

Why "Migration Cost" Is the Wrong Question

When someone asks what a migration costs, they're usually picturing a content transfer — move the pages and posts from the old platform to the new one, point the domain, done. That's the $500 version, and for a tiny brochure site with five pages and no traffic, it's fine.

But that's almost never what a funded company actually needs. What they need is a site that:

• Looks like it belongs to a company at their stage and ambition

• Removes the bottleneck that made them want to leave WordPress in the first place

• Keeps every bit of organic traffic and ranking authority the old site earned

• Is built to be edited and extended by their team afterward

That's not a transfer. That's a rebuild with migration discipline layered on top. And it's priced accordingly, because it's a fundamentally different amount of work.

The danger is that the two look identical on a proposal until you compare what's actually included. The cheap quote skips the design, skips the redirect mapping, skips the SEO preservation, and skips the QA. You find out what was skipped three weeks after launch, when your traffic is down a third and the savings have evaporated several times over.

What Actually Drives Migration Cost

Six factors explain almost the entire price range. Understanding them lets you read any quote intelligently.

1. Page count and content volume. A 10-page marketing site is a different project from a 200-page site with a 500-post blog. More pages means more design, more rebuild, and more URLs to map and redirect.

2. Redesign vs. straight port. Are you recreating the existing design on a new platform, or redesigning as you migrate? A redesign is more expensive, but a migration is the single best moment to fix a design that's been holding you back — you're rebuilding everything anyway. Most companies leaving WordPress want the redesign, because the design ceiling was part of why they left.

3. Functional complexity. A simple marketing site is straightforward. Memberships, gated content, complex forms, CRM and marketing-automation integrations, custom calculators, multilingual content — each one adds real scope.

4. Content volume and CMS structure. Migrating a large, structured content library — multiple content types, complex taxonomies, hundreds of items — takes meaningful work to map and move cleanly.

5. SEO preservation work. This is the line item cheap quotes delete first, and it's the one that protects your traffic: the full audit, the complete 301 redirect map, on-page SEO reproduction, and post-launch monitoring. It's not optional if you have traffic worth keeping.

6. Who does the work. A freelancer, a productized subscription service, and a senior studio price very differently — and deliver very differently. More on that below.

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. Your only hard costs are the platform subscription and your domain. The real cost is your time and the risk — DIY migrations are where I see the worst SEO losses, because the redirect and on-page work is exactly the tedious detail an untrained person skips. Viable for a small site with little traffic to lose. Risky for anything that matters to the business.

Option 2: Hire a freelancer

Freelance web designers typically charge somewhere in the region of $20–$75 per hour, with rates varying widely by skill and experience. For a straightforward marketing site, a good freelancer is a reasonable middle path. The trade-offs: you're usually getting one person's range of skills (design or development or SEO, rarely all three at a senior level), capacity is limited, and the SEO-preservation discipline depends entirely on whether that specific person takes it seriously. Quality varies enormously. The cheap end of the freelance market is where you find the "I'll migrate your site for a few hundred dollars" offers — and that's the content-transfer trap wearing a freelancer's hat.

Option 3: Work with a studio or agency

This is where the range widens, because "agency" covers everything from productized subscription services to senior strategic studios.

Productized subscription services — the "unlimited design requests" model — run in the region of $3,000–$5,000 per month and work through a task queue, one request at a time. They're good for steady small updates; they're not built for a complex migration that needs senior strategy and parallel workstreams.

A senior studio prices the migration as the rebuild it actually is. For a typical funded-SaaS marketing site — redesign plus migration, full SEO preservation, a proper design system, and the QA and monitoring that protect the launch — you're looking at a project, not a monthly subscription fee. The number reflects design quality, strategic input, and the discipline that keeps your rankings intact. It's the most expensive option up front and the cheapest option once you account for the traffic a cheap migration loses.

I'll be straight about where we sit. At DesignMe we don't do content transfers, and we don't take migration work below the level where we can do it properly — that means a real audit, a complete redirect map, a genuine redesign where the brief calls for it, and post-launch monitoring. When we raised our prices at the start of this year, our average project value moved from around $8K to $14K, and the work didn't get more expensive to deliver — we just stopped pricing it as if it were a commodity, because it isn't.

Don't Forget the Ongoing Platform Cost

The migration is a one-time project cost. The platform is a recurring cost, and it's worth factoring into the total picture. Both Webflow and Framer restructured their pricing in 2026, so here's where things actually stand.

Webflow simplified its plans in May 2026. The free Starter plan lets you build but not publish to a custom domain. The Basic plan is $15/month billed annually but includes no CMS — fine for a static site, wrong for anything content-driven. The plan most B2B marketing sites actually need is Premium, at $25/month billed annually (or $39/month monthly), which now includes 20,000 CMS items and 40 collections after Webflow merged its old CMS and Business plans into one tier. Above that sits the Team plan at $2,500/month for organizations that have outgrown self-serve. Remember that Webflow bills the site plan and the workspace seats separately, so the true cost for a team includes per-seat fees on top.

Framer is generally the leaner option for marketing sites. Its free plan publishes only to a Framer subdomain. The Basic plan is $10/month billed annually for small sites with minimal CMS. The plan most businesses want is Pro at $30/month billed annually (or $45/month monthly), with 10 CMS collections and the features real client work needs. Scale, at $100/month, is for high-traffic sites. Framer also bills editor seats separately — currently $20 per editor per month after a reduction earlier this year — though if you work with a certified Framer expert, their editor seat on your project is typically free.

In both cases, neither platform includes your domain, which runs roughly $10–$20 a year from a registrar.

The honest takeaway: platform subscription is a rounding error next to the migration project itself. A few hundred dollars a year on hosting and CMS, versus a one-time rebuild that determines whether your site works for the next several years. Don't let the recurring number distract you from the decision that actually matters. We break the platform-cost detail down further in our Webflow and Framer pricing guides.

The Real Cost Is the Migration You Don't Pay For

I want to end on the thing that genuinely costs companies the most, because it's invisible on every quote.

The most expensive migration is the cheap one that loses your traffic. If organic search drives a meaningful share of your pipeline — and for most of the SaaS companies we work with, it does — then a botched migration that drops your rankings is a revenue event, not a line item. I've seen teams "save" a few thousand dollars on a budget migration and then spend six months and far more than they saved trying to claw back the traffic they lost in a weekend.

We took a short traffic dip on our own relaunch last year — caught it in Ahrefs, traced it to redirect gaps, fixed it with a clean 301 map, recovered. And we do this for a living. The point isn't that we're immune; it's that migrations punish missing discipline, and the discipline is exactly what gets cut to hit a low price. When you pay for a proper migration, a large 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 preservation, and the monitoring. The number will be higher than the content-transfer quote, and it will be the cheapest version of this project you ever pay for.

How to Budget for Your Migration

1. Define the scope honestly. Page count, redesign or port, functional complexity, content volume. This determines everything.

2. Insist on SEO preservation as a named deliverable. If a quote doesn't mention the audit, redirect map, and on-page reproduction, it's a content transfer, not a migration. Walk away or ask for it explicitly.

3. Factor the platform subscription — a few hundred dollars a year — but don't let it drive the decision.

4. Weigh the cost of lost traffic against the saving from a cheap quote. For most funded companies, the math favours doing it properly by a wide margin.

5. Pick the right partner for the stakes. DIY and budget freelancers for low-stakes sites; a senior studio when traffic and brand are on the line.

For the full process behind the pricing, see 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 migration decision guide will help.

DesignMe redesigns and migrates websites for funded B2B SaaS and AI companies — priced as the rebuilds they actually are, with SEO preservation built in from the first audit. If you want a straight, scoped number for your migration rather than a content-transfer quote that costs you later, our intro call is 30 minutes:

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