What a store migration actually costs

Ask any prospective partner to price these four separately, because a single number hides which one is expensive. Content format: block markup extracts in days, Elementor JSON in a week or two, WPBakery shortcodes depend entirely on how many distinct tags your site registers. Configuration with no export: theme options panels, header builders, hook-injected fragments — all transcribed by hand. Plugin surface: every plugin touching the storefront needs a decision, and the ones writing to custom database tables are the expensive ones. Traffic at risk: a store with 40 indexed pages needs a spreadsheet, a store with 12,000 needs a mapped, tested and monitored redirect programme.

• Content format — the single biggest driver of extraction cost
• Configuration outside content exports — always manual, always underestimated
• Plugin count and what each one touches
• Indexed URLs with impressions — this drives QA, not development

Once the field mapping between two systems is written, running it against 500 or 15,000 products costs roughly the same. What does scale with catalog size is reconciliation: checking that prices, stock levels and variant relationships came across correctly. At a few hundred products a person can eyeball it. Past a few thousand you need scripted comparison against the source system, and that is real work — but it is measured in days, not in proportion to your SKU count. A quote that scales linearly with product count deserves one question before signing: what exactly happens per product? The honest answer rarely justifies the slope.

Four costs land after the invoice and belong in the budget from the start. Hosting, because leaving a SaaS platform means buying what it was absorbing — expect a real figure, not $5/month shared hosting, or the performance argument for migrating collapses. Ongoing maintenance: plugin updates, PHP versions, backups and monitoring, which is why we quote a Care Plan from $150/month rather than pretending it is free. Content re-entry for anything that had no export path. And parallel running, because keeping the old system live read-only for a month is the cheapest insurance in the project.

• Hosting at a real specification, not the cheapest tier
• Maintenance from about $150/month, or a developer on call
• Manual content re-entry for unexportable configuration
• A month of parallel hosting for the old system

A migration quoted well below market is usually skipping the same three things, and they are the three that determine whether the project succeeds. It is running an automated import without reconciling the result against the source. It is generating redirects from the sitemap rather than from Search Console impressions, which means every URL that earned traffic but is not in the sitemap silently 404s. And it is not testing checkout end to end with real payment methods before launch. You will not see any of these omissions in the proposal. You will see them six weeks after launch when organic traffic is down 40% and nobody can say which URLs used to rank.

Do not compare totals. Ask both parties for the same four numbers — extraction, configuration transcription, redirect mapping, QA — then ask each how they build the redirect map and what they reconcile the catalog against. Those two answers separate a real migration from an import script.

Three cases where we say no, and you should hear them from anyone you ask. Green CrUX vitals with a complaint about a lab score sitting on top of them: there is nothing here to sell you. If the slowness traces to database queries or oversubscribed hosting, migrating carries the problem across unchanged and a $200 hosting move fixes more than a $15,000 rebuild. And if nobody will own maintenance afterwards, the migration converts a working store into a decaying one — that is not a saving, it is deferred cost with interest.

For a store on a block-based theme with clean URLs and under 500 products, a straightforward storefront setup starts around $1,999 and runs one to two weeks. Add a branded design, custom sections and a deeper SEO migration plan and it starts around $4,500. Past that — a large catalog, a builder-heavy site with thousands of indexed URLs, or a plugin stack with several custom integrations — the honest answer is that a fixed number before an audit would be a guess, which is why that tier is quoted individually. If a firm price is offered without anyone seeing your Search Console and your plugin list, treat it as a number someone will need to revise rather than a commitment.