You want a number. Fair. Here is the honest version: nobody can quote you how much website migration costs without counting what your site has already published. Anyone who does is guessing, or planning to skip the work.
We will not invent a figure here. We will show you what moves the price, so you can read any quote and know what is in it.
Why does website migration cost vary so much?
Because two sites that both say "50 pages" can be wildly different jobs.
One was built last year on a single platform. Its addresses have never changed. The other has lived through three platforms, two redesigns and a decade of blog posts. Its search history is buried in layers.
A rebuild changes how your site looks. A migration protects what search engines and customers already know about it. Different job, different bill.
What you are actually paying for in an SEO migration
Mostly, you are paying for careful counting and careful matching. Not for clever software.
The work breaks into four parts:
- Tracing every address the site has ever published
- Carrying over each page's own words
- Mapping each old address to the right new one
- Restoring markup, the code that tells Google what a page is
Each part grows with the size and age of your site. That is the whole pricing story. The rest is detail.
How the count of old addresses changes the work
Start with the count, because everything else follows from it.
Your current sitemap shows only what exists today. Search engines, old links and customer bookmarks remember more. Pages from earlier platforms, retired services, old blog structures. All of them can still send someone to your door.
Tracing those addresses means digging through older versions of the site, not just the current one. More history means more digging.
Take A New Leaf Painting, a Jacksonville contractor. Since 2010 the site grew to hundreds of blog posts and paint guides, customer video stories, and a page for nearly every town the crews work in. When that site was moved to a new platform, hundreds of old addresses were redirected to the homepage. The full story is in the case study. The point for pricing: that scope is not a "small site" scope, and nobody should quote it like one.
Carrying over every page's own words versus rewriting
Every page has its own words. Those words are why it ranks for anything at all.
Carrying them over faithfully takes time. Each page has to land at its original address with its text intact, then be checked. Rewriting everything from scratch can feel cleaner, but it throws away what search engines already understood about that page.
Faithful carry-over costs more up front and less later. For A New Leaf, every page was rebuilt at its original address with its own words, from service pages to town pages to every blog post and video story. Nothing a customer or a search engine knew went missing.
If your site is small and your content is thin, rewriting may be fine. Say so out loud and decide on purpose.
Redirect mapping: one hop to the right page
A redirect is a forwarding sign. A good one points straight to the right page. A bad one points to the homepage, or bounces through two or three stops first.
Mapping means a human decides, address by address, where each old page should go. That is slow. It is also where the money is protected.
The standard to hold your agency to: one hop, to the page that replaced it. Not a chain. Not a catch-all.
Sending everything to the homepage is the cheap version. It looks like a redirect. It tells search engines the old page has nothing specific to point to, and visitors land somewhere that has nothing to do with what they clicked.
Thin pages: when a clean "gone" is the right answer
Not every old address deserves a successor.
Some sites accumulate thin, near-identical pages. Think a town page that only swaps one place name into the same paragraph. Redirecting those to a real page pretends they were something they were not.
On A New Leaf's site, those thin pages got a clean "gone" instead. Everything with a real replacement went to it in a single hop. The pages that should never have been published were retired honestly.
This saves money in one way and costs a little in another. You do not build pages that add nothing. But someone has to judge each page, and that judgment is billable time worth paying for.
Why markup is part of the bill
Markup is the hidden labor. It is code that tells Google a page is an article, a business, or a breadcrumb trail.
On the Jacksonville site, the blog had lost it in the move. Restoring it meant describing the business once, adding breadcrumbs on every page, and adding article markup on every post.
Pages count here. Hundreds of posts means hundreds of pages to get right, and the work must be consistent. Price rises with the number of page types and the number of pages.
What a rushed migration costs you later
A rushed migration looks cheaper on the quote. It is not.
Here is what the shortcuts leave behind:
- Old addresses that still appear in search results, but lead nowhere useful
- Visitors dropped on the homepage after clicking something specific
- Posts that search engines no longer recognize as posts
- A cleanup job that someone has to do anyway, with the damage already done
That last one is the key. The work you skip at launch does not disappear. It returns as a repair project, and repairs are harder than doing it right the first time. A New Leaf's rebuild was exactly this kind of recovery: tracing addresses back through older platforms after the first move had already gone wrong.
You can pay for the careful version once. Or you can pay for the rushed one, then the fix.
Questions to ask before you hire someone to move your site
Bring these to any call. Good answers are specific.
- How will you count my old addresses, including ones from earlier platforms?
- Will every old address answer in one hop?
- What happens to thin or near-duplicate pages?
- Will each page keep its own words, or is it being rewritten?
- Who restores the markup, and on which page types?
- How will you check the result after launch?
If the answer to the first question is "we'll use your current sitemap," keep looking. That is a count of what you have, not what you had.
Our SEO and analytics work starts with exactly that count.
Your next step
Before you ask anyone for a quote, write down every platform your site has lived on and roughly how many posts, service pages and location pages it has carried. That list is the most useful thing you can hand over. When you are ready to talk through it, start here and bring the list.