A CMS migration — moving your pages, files, and settings from one content management platform to another — typically costs $2,000–$5,000 for a small site under 50 pages and takes 1–2 weeks, according to Tenet in Tenet's migration cost breakdown. Most small to mid-sized business migrations fall between $1,000–$25,000 depending on platform and scope. The range is wide because platform, page count, redesign, and integrations change the work. A simple lift-and-shift costs far less than a rebuild with new templates, forms, and connections.
Official resource:
- Follow Google's site-move checklist for redirects and monitoring — Verify the required URL mapping, redirect setup, and traffic-monitoring steps to budget for SEO protection.
Table of Contents
- What drives the final price?
- What do common small-business moves cost?
- Why does content cleanup matter so much?
- How do you protect traffic and cover hidden work?
What drives the final price?
Page count, platform distance, and redesign set the baseline. Moving within WordPress with the same structure is straightforward. Switching systems, restructuring URLs, or rebuilding layouts adds design, development, and testing time.
Integrations and custom features push costs higher. Membership areas, stores, booking tools, multilingual content, and custom fields need rebuilding and checks. Content volume matters too, since every page, image, PDF, and metadata field needs a decision.
What do common small-business moves cost?
Simple WordPress or small-business sites can migrate for $100–$2,500 using plugins or freelancers, while CMS-to-CMS or platform changes cost $500–$10,000 or more when redesign is included, according to Cloudways. A small HubSpot Content Hub migration of 10–50 pages costs about $5,000–$10,000 and takes 3–5 weeks when handled by a partner.
WordPress-to-Webflow work starts around $5,000 for a simple small site and reaches $30,000 or more for an enterprise rebuild, according to KrishaWeb in KrishaWeb's WordPress-to-Webflow guide. That path also carries ongoing Webflow costs of roughly $300–$500 per month. Use those bands to match quotes to your case, not as fixed bids.
Why does content cleanup matter so much?
Content is the most underestimated budget item because old pages, posts, images, PDFs, metadata, and archives accumulate over time, according to Hackread. Moving everything without review makes the project more expensive and harder to manage. Audit before you migrate.
Keep current service, product, and location pages. Archive outdated posts, merge duplicates, compress images, and drop stale PDFs. A smaller, cleaner inventory lowers transfer, redirect, and testing time.
How do you protect traffic and cover hidden work?
Google warns owners to expect temporary ranking fluctuations during a significant move, with medium-sized sites taking a few weeks or more for new URLs to replace old ones in results, as described in Google's site-move documentation. Plan for that dip in reports and ad landing pages.
Keep old URLs live until redirects are tested. Google instructs owners to prepare a full old-to-new URL map, redirect servers from old to new URLs, submit a sitemap to speed discovery, and monitor traffic on both URL sets after launch, as described in Google's URL-mapping guidance. Budget these tasks separately rather than treating migration as hosting plus theme setup alone, following Numinam's approach:.
- inventory and cleaning
- content transfer
- 301-redirect mapping
- integrations
- QA testing and staff training
