Three agencies, three wildly different quotes for the same move. Here’s what actually drives the price, where DIY quietly costs you anyway, and when hiring beats it outright.
- “WordPress migration” describes five different jobs, and price follows the job. Site size, where the content is coming from, custom code, and how many URLs need redirecting all move the number independently.
- DIY with a free plugin costs $0 but caps out around 200GB and five site migrations a month on Migrate Guru, the biggest free tool. A premium extension runs about $69/year once you outgrow that.
- A done-for-you migration commonly runs $150-$500 for a standard host or domain move and climbs past $2,000 for stores, platform changes, or headless rebuilds, per the baseline ranges in the full migration guide.
- The real cost rarely shows up on the invoice. It shows up as lost rankings from a half-finished redirect map, downtime during a rushed cutover, or the afternoon you spend hand-fixing formatting a plugin quietly mangled.
- Hiring beats DIY the moment the site makes money, carries custom code, or is switching platforms, because that’s exactly where a “free” plugin migration turns into unpaid hours nobody budgeted for.
- Last updated September 9, 2026.
What actually drives the cost of a WordPress migration?
Ask three agencies to quote the same migration and you can get three numbers a factor of ten apart. That’s not a shakedown. “Migrate my WordPress site” describes five genuinely different jobs, and the price follows the job, not the phrase.
Four variables set the number before anyone even picks a method. Understand these and a quote stops looking arbitrary.
Site size
Your database size plus the uploads folder decides whether the move fits inside a free plugin’s ceiling, needs a paid tier, or needs a different method entirely. A five-page brochure site and a decade of blog posts with a gigabyte of images are not the same job, even on identical hosting.
Where the content is coming from
A same-platform host move barely touches the content, so it’s the cheapest type by a wide margin. Escaping a closed builder like Wix, or a different CMS entirely like Drupal or Joomla, means the content gets mapped and often rebuilt, not just copied, because none of those platforms export cleanly into WordPress’s format. The full breakdown of the five migration types covers how each one changes the job.
Custom code and plugin count
Every custom plugin, every theme tweak, every CRM or booking-tool integration is one more thing that has to be tested on the new server, not just copied to it. A new host can expose incompatibilities the old one was quietly hiding, and finding those after the cutover costs more than finding them before.
How many URLs need a new home
A host move on the same domain touches zero URLs. A domain change or platform switch means every URL potentially needs a 301 redirect to its new address, and mapping a few hundred legacy URLs correctly is real, billable research, not a checkbox.
Whether it’s a migration at all, or a re-architecture
Moving to a headless Next.js frontend isn’t copying a site to a new address. It’s building a new frontend from scratch against the WordPress API, a development project measured in weeks and priced accordingly, not a same-day plugin job.
DIY, a plugin, or done-for-you: what does each path really cost?
The WordPress migration guide already lays out the baseline numbers: free to roughly $199/year for DIY tools, and commonly $150-$2,000-plus for a done-for-you move. What’s worth adding here is where the cost hides inside each option, because the sticker price is never the whole story.
| Method | What it actually costs | Where the cost hides | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plugin | $0. Migrate Guru handles sites up to 200GB with no file-size fee, per its official WordPress.org listing | A 5-site-per-month cap on the free tier, and zero help with redirects, testing, or SEO once the files land | Small, simple, same-domain host moves |
| Premium plugin add-on | Roughly $69/year for All-in-One WP Migration’s Unlimited Extension, per ServMask’s own pricing page | Removes the size ceiling, but you’re still configuring redirects and testing the result yourself | Medium sites, repeat migrations, agencies moving several client sites |
| Manual (SFTP + WP-CLI) | $0 in tool cost, several hours of your own time | The learning curve. A blind SQL find-and-replace on serialized data is how a manual move turns into a support ticket | Developers, very large sites, hosts that block plugin-based transfers |
| Done-for-you service | $150-$500 for a standard move, climbing past $2,000 for stores, platform changes, or headless rebuilds | The fee is the cost. Redirects, testing, and rollback are priced in up front, not discovered mid-project | Revenue-critical sites, platform escapes, anything where downtime has a real dollar cost attached |
Notice the pattern. DIY options look free right up until something outside the plugin’s job description needs handling: a redirect map, a compatibility conflict, a rollback plan. A done-for-you quote prices that work in up front instead of letting you discover it partway through.
How does the cost change by the kind of site you’re moving?
The published DIY-to-done-for-you range is real, but it’s a range for a reason. Where your project actually lands inside it depends on which scenario below describes your site.
Small brochure site, same domain, new host
The cheapest, lowest-risk scenario. No redirects needed, a small database, and a free plugin usually handles the whole thing inside an hour. This is exactly the scenario most migration plugins’ free tier was built for.
Business site with forms, plugins, and a domain change
Now you’re paying for two things at once: the transfer itself, and a proper redirect map for every URL that’s about to change. This is where a premium plugin plus your own redirect work, or a modest done-for-you quote, starts to beat the free tier.
E-commerce or content-heavy site
Product catalogs, order history, and hundreds or thousands of posts push you toward the top of the size range fast, and a stalled transfer or a corrupted order table is not something you want to discover after a plugin timeout. This is squarely done-for-you territory.
Escaping a closed platform (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, HubSpot, Joomla, Drupal)
Not a copy job. Content gets mapped out of a completely different data structure, styling gets rebuilt, and redirects get planned from URLs the old platform generated automatically. Budget closer to a small rebuild than a simple migration. Compare the migration plugins built for this before assuming a straight plugin transfer will work, because on most of these platforms it won’t.
Headless re-architecture
A different project wearing a migration’s name. You’re building a new frontend, not copying an old one, so pricing follows development scope rather than site size. The headless migration guide walks through why that’s true.
What hidden costs catch people off guard?
The invoice, or the lack of one on a free plugin, is rarely where a migration actually costs you. The expensive part shows up after the files land.
Lost search rankings
Google is explicit that a 301 redirect passes ranking signals to the new URL, and for a domain change it wants a Change of Address filed in Search Console with redirects held for at least a year, per Google’s own site-move documentation. Skip that work, or half-finish it, and you’re not saving money. You’re spending SEO equity a site took years to earn.
Downtime
Large downtime-cost studies get cited a lot, and the headline numbers, like the roughly $15,000-per-minute average in Splunk and Cisco’s Hidden Costs of Downtime 2026 report as summarized by Gatling, are built from enterprise data and don’t map onto a small Ontario business. What does map: a broken checkout or a dead contact form for a few hours during a migration is a few hours of leads and orders that never happened, and nobody sends you an invoice for those. That’s exactly why testing on staging before the DNS switch, not after, is the cheapest insurance in the whole process.
Redirect mapping labor
A five-URL redirect list is a ten-minute job. A few hundred legacy URLs, each needing a destination that actually matches where the content landed, is a real research project, and getting it wrong quietly bleeds the traffic those pages spent years earning.
Cleanup after a “successful” transfer
A plugin can report a migration complete and still leave you with formatting to fix by hand, plugin conflicts the new host exposes that the old one hid, or a media library that only made it 95% of the way across. None of that shows up on the plugin’s price tag.
Email that quietly stops working
Website and email run on separate DNS records, and MX records should move only once the site itself is confirmed working, or deliverability drops right in the middle of the switch. It’s an easy step to forget when you’re focused on the site.
When does hiring a professional actually beat doing it yourself?
Hiring wins the moment the cost of a mistake is bigger than the fee, and that threshold arrives sooner than most people expect.
- The site makes money. An hour of downtime or a broken checkout on a revenue site costs more than most done-for-you migrations do in total.
- You’re carrying custom code. Custom plugins, integrations, and theme modifications are exactly what a free migration tool doesn’t test for you.
- You’re changing platforms. Moving off Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, HubSpot, Joomla, or Drupal isn’t a copy job, and DIY tools built for WordPress-to-WordPress moves won’t cover it.
- You have real SEO equity to protect. Years of rankings and backlinks riding on URLs that are about to change is not the place to learn redirect mapping for the first time.
- You’re going headless. A headless re-architecture is a development project, not a transfer, full stop.
Run the DIY math honestly and it usually includes hours nobody put a price on: the learning curve, the redirect research, the afternoon spent chasing a broken plugin conflict. None of that is free. It’s just unbilled. A done-for-you quote puts a number on that time up front, which is exactly why it can end up cheaper than “free” once the whole job is accounted for.
How do you actually budget for a WordPress migration?
Work through these in order and a quote, whether it’s your own time or someone else’s invoice, stops being a guess.
- Size the site. Check your database size and the total of your
uploadsfolder. That number alone tells you whether a free plugin’s ceiling is even in play. - Name your migration type. Host move, domain change, platform escape, builder swap, or headless rebuild. Each has a different cost profile, and mixing them up is how people budget for the wrong project.
- Count your redirect surface. Is the domain or URL structure changing at all? If not, most of the redirect cost disappears. If so, get a rough count of URLs that need mapping before you ask anyone for a number.
- Price in your downtime tolerance. A site that can absorb a rough afternoon is a different budget than one that can’t go down for five minutes.
- Get quotes that cover the same scope. Ask directly whether testing, redirects, and a rollback plan are included, not billed separately later. That’s the only way to compare two quotes honestly.
A free pre-migration audit answers the first two of those before you request a single quote.
Where do you go from here?
The honest number is this: budget by scenario, not by one global figure, and treat redirects and testing as part of the cost, not an optional extra you discover later.
Doing a standard host or domain move on a small site? A free or premium plugin is genuinely enough. Carrying custom code, changing platforms, or running a site that earns real revenue? jbe.works WordPress Migration prices the whole job, redirects and rollback included, so nothing shows up as a surprise afterward. Not sure which bucket you’re in? Run a free pre-migration audit and find out before you request a single quote.
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers to what people ask most about migration pricing.
Planning a migration and want it done without losing rankings?
Redirect maps, an SEO-safe cutover and post-launch checks, handled start to finish.
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