What it costs, and what moves the number.
Migrations start at $5,000 and are priced once, after the site has been scoped, before any work begins. What decides where a particular site lands is below, in the order it matters.
Where does your site land?
Check what is publicly visible, add what only you know about the content and who edits it, and take away a scope brief. No email, and nothing is sent until you choose to send it.
Open the cost calculatorThe page count is the start of the question.
Every request for a migration quote arrives with a page count, and it is the right thing to bring: it is just not the whole of it. What a migration costs is decided by how many distinct templates are behind those pages, how the content relates to itself, how many integrations have to be rebuilt and how much URL history has to be carried. Two sites with four hundred pages each can differ by a factor of five, and the difference is visible in about twenty minutes of looking.
That is what the site performance check is for: it looks at your site and reports what is actually there, so the number is based on your site rather than on an average.
Where the work is
Templated
Five templates, and the other fifty-five rendered from them. Five things to rebuild.
Hand-built
Thirty-eight adjusted individually. Thirty-eight things to rebuild, or to decide not to.
| page | 60 | 60 |
|---|---|---|
| built by hand | 5 | 38 |
Seven things decide the estimate.
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Number of templates, not number of pages
Two sites with the same page count can differ by a factor of seven, because what gets rebuilt is the number of distinct templates rather than the number of pages rendered from them. This is the single biggest variable, and it is the one people are most often surprised by, in both directions.
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How much the CMS is doing
A blog with a title, a body and an author is a short job. Collections with multi-reference fields, nested relationships and items that drive layout are a content modeling exercise before they are a migration.
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Custom code already on the site
Custom code is usually the reason a team is leaving, and it is rarely portable as written. Some of it is a few lines that become a component. Some of it was compensating for a platform limit that no longer applies, and the right move is to delete it.
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Integrations, counted honestly
Forms, analytics, consent, CRM, chat, scheduling, payments. Each one is re-established and tested separately. Five integrations is not five times one integration, but it is not one either.
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URL surface
A hundred URLs is an afternoon of mapping. Several thousand, with historic paths, paginated archives and campaign URLs nothing links to any more, is its own workstream.
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How closely the design is kept
Rebuilding the existing design as it stands is the cheapest path and usually the right one. Redesigning while migrating is two projects, and running them together is how both get worse.
Scope stated in both directions.
- A redesign. If the design changes, that is scoped separately and I would rather do it after the move than during it.
- New content. Existing content is migrated; writing new pages is a different job.
- Hosting and platform costs, which go to whoever you host with rather than to me.
- Ongoing development after launch, which is a monthly retainer, agreed separately.
The cheapest migration is the one that moves the site as it is and changes nothing else. Every addition is worth doing on its own merits, and worth doing separately.
Scoped once, then agreed in writing.
The figure below is the floor, not the quote. What a particular site lands at is decided by the drivers above, which is why the scope is settled before the number is.
What the migration includes.
Migration
An established site rebuilt as an Astro codebase, scoped and priced once before anything starts.
$5,000+
priced by what has to move, not by page count
- Audit of pages, URLs, CMS, integrations and custom code
- Content model designed, then the site rebuilt as components
- Content, assets and metadata migrated and verified
- Redirects mapped and tested against the real inventory
- Integrations rebuilt, then cutover and the checks after it
Afterwards
Continuous development on the codebase is $2,500 a month, worked one request at a time with no minimum term.
Not ready to scope it yet? Run a free site check, which reports what the site is running now and sends nothing to me.
Some sites should not pay for this at all.
If your team edits layouts visually every week, your CMS needs are modest and the site is working, a migration costs you money and takes away something you use. That is a real outcome and I would rather say so before you spend anything. The stay or move decision is written out properly, including the cases where staying wins.
Reach out and see if we are a good fit.
Currently booking two to four weeks out.