If you are asking how much it costs to move a large blog to a new website, here is the short answer. More than the design suggests, and for a reason most quotes never explain.
A new site with a dozen page templates is a design job. A site with hundreds of posts is a design job plus a records job. Every one of those posts has an address that people have bookmarked, linked to, and found in Google. Moving them is the expensive part.
We can't give you a dollar figure without seeing your site, and anyone who does is guessing. We can tell you what drives the number.
Why does a big blog cost more to move than to design?
Because design scales with templates and migration scales with pages.
A blog post template is built once. Carrying three hundred posts into it is not. Each post has an address, a body of words, images, markup, and a history of where it lived on older platforms.
Skip that work and the site looks great on launch day. It also quietly forgets everything it knew.
That is the trap. The finished design is visible. The missing records are not, until traffic drops and nobody can say why.
What did A New Leaf's botched move show about the real cost?
A New Leaf Painting Contractors has painted homes and businesses across Jacksonville and Northeast Florida since 2010. Its site grew with it: hundreds of blog posts and paint guides, customer video stories, and a page for nearly every town the crews work in.
Then the site moved to a new platform, and the move went badly.
- Hundreds of old addresses were redirected to the homepage.
- Pages that search engines still listed were gone.
- The blog had lost the markup that tells Google what a post is.
Nothing about that looks broken to a visitor who lands on the homepage. It is broken for everyone who arrived expecting a specific article. The full rebuild put every page back at its original address with its own words carried over. That is the price of doing it right after doing it wrong.
Which work is per page and which is one-time?
Ask for this split. It is the clearest way to read a quote.
One-time work:
- Templates for posts, service pages, and town pages
- The redirect rules and the system that serves them
- The markup structure for the business, breadcrumbs, and articles
- Testing and launch checks
Per-page work:
- Carrying each post across with its words intact
- Confirming each address still answers
- Deciding what happens to each old address that has no clean twin
- Checking each post's markup came through
The one-time work is a fixed cost. The per-page work grows with your archive. A fair quote shows you both, so you can see why five hundred posts cost more than fifty.
What does tracing every old address involve, and why does it take time?
It means finding every address your site has ever published, not just the ones in today's sitemap.
Sites that have changed platforms carry layers. An address from the first platform may have been redirected to a second, then abandoned on the third. If you only look at the current site, you miss the older layers, and those are often the addresses that still have links pointing at them.
On A New Leaf, we traced every address the site had published, back through its older platforms. Each one now answers in a single hop, to the page that replaced it.
One hop matters. Chains of redirects slow things down. A clean map is slow to build because someone has to read it, not just generate it.
Why do thin near-duplicate pages get retired rather than moved?
Because moving a bad page just moves the problem.
Large sites collect pages that say almost the same thing. A template stamped across towns with only the name swapped is the classic case. Pages like that dilute a site, and they should not have been published.
In the A New Leaf rebuild, those thin, near-identical pages were not carried across. Their addresses answer with a clean "gone" instead.
That is a decision, and it takes judgment per group of pages. It is also why a careful migration can end with fewer pages than it started with. A quote that promises to move "everything" should make you suspicious.
What does restoring article markup on every post add?
Markup is the hidden description a page gives to search engines. It says this is an article, here is its title, here is who published it.
When A New Leaf's botched move stripped it, the blog stopped telling Google what its posts were. The rebuild restored clean markup everywhere: one business described once, breadcrumbs on every page, and article markup on every post.
Done by template, this is cheap. Done properly, it also means checking that the template produced correct output across hundreds of real posts, with odd titles, missing images, and old formatting. That checking is the cost. It is also the difference between markup that exists and markup that works.
Which quote line items protect your rankings?
Look for these by name:
- Address inventory. A full list of every published address, including older platforms.
- Redirect map. Old address to new address, one hop each.
- Retirement list. Which pages are being dropped, and why.
- Content carry-over. Each post's words and images moved, not rewritten by accident.
- Article and breadcrumb markup. On every post, verified.
- Post-launch checks. Someone testing the old addresses after the switch.
If a line is missing, ask whether the work is included or skipped. Our SEO and analytics service covers this work, but the checklist applies to any developer.
How do you compare a cheap migration to a careful one?
Cheap migrations are not lazy. They are missing scope.
The cheap quote moves the design and the posts, points leftover addresses at the homepage, and calls it done. It is faster and the invoice is smaller. It also repeats what happened to A New Leaf.
The careful quote costs more up front for the tracing, the retirement decisions, and the checks. The difference is who pays later.
When rankings drop after a bad move, you pay twice. Once in lost visitors, and again for someone to trace the addresses that should have been traced at the start. Repair is harder than prevention because you are rebuilding the record from older platforms after the fact.
What should you ask a Triangle developer before signing?
Bring these to any developer in Raleigh, Durham, or Cary, including us:
- Will the redirect map be shared before launch?
- How do you find addresses from older platforms?
- What happens to old addresses with no replacement?
- Will every post keep its original address?
- Can the markup on a sample post be shown before launch?
- Who checks the old addresses after launch, and when?
Good answers are specific. Vague answers like "we handle redirects" are the warning sign.
What is the next step?
Before you request any quote, count your posts and export a list of your current addresses. That list is the first thing any honest estimate needs. If you want a second set of eyes on it, tell us about your site and send the list along.