How Much Does a WordPress Migration Cost?

Three phrasings people use for the same job, answered plainly.

How much does it cost to migrate a WordPress site?

A typical 2026 WordPress migration costs NZD $2,500 to $8,500 for a like-for-like move of a 5 to 10 page small business site, and NZD $8,000 to $25,000 when the move is paired with a redesign. The numbers swing on target platform, plugin count, and whether the site was built with a page builder.

What does WordPress to Shopify migration cost?

A WordPress-to-Shopify move with 5 to 15 products lands at NZD $4,000 to $9,000 like-for-like and NZD $8,500 to $18,000 with a redesign. Pure product and customer data migration, with no theme work, sits at NZD $2,500 to $5,000.

How much to just transfer a WordPress site to a new host?

Moving the same WordPress site to a new host (no platform change, no redesign) is the cheapest version of all, usually NZD $170 to $1,500. That is a host transfer, not a true migration, and the two get confused constantly. More on that below.

Most platforms store content in a predictable structure. WordPress lets every site invent its own. That flexibility is exactly why WordPress is everywhere, and exactly why it is awkward to leave.

When you migrate off Webflow or Squarespace, the content sits in a known shape and exports cleanly. When you migrate off WordPress, the content might be in the editor, or in a page builder's proprietary shortcodes, or in custom fields added by a plugin that the last developer installed and never documented. Each of those needs a different extraction method, and that is where the hours go.

A clean WordPress install with the block editor and a handful of standard plugins is cheap to move. A six-year-old Divi build with forty plugins is a different project entirely, even if both sites have ten pages.

Realistic 2026 ranges by who does the work and how complex the build is. NZD primary, USD secondary.

Most small and mid-sized businesses sit in the studio band. The jump to the top row is usually WooCommerce with a real catalogue, or a plugin stack that has quietly become custom software. For the wider pricing context behind these tiers, see our pillar on how much a website costs.

Where you move to changes the price as much as what you move from. Four of the most common 2026 WordPress destinations and their typical fixed-price studio cost in NZD.

WordPress to Shopify is common for businesses that started on WooCommerce and want the catalogue, payments, and tax handled for them. WordPress to Webflow suits content and marketing sites that want design freedom without the plugin maintenance. The static route (Astro, Next.js on Vercel) is the fastest and most secure option, and the one we reach for most, because there is no database to hack and nothing to update on a Friday. Our guide to a Shopify migration without losing SEO covers the ecommerce side in detail, and our Webflow migration cost guide covers that destination specifically.

This is the single biggest reason WordPress migration quotes vary so much, and the question a good studio asks first.

Page builders like Elementor, Divi, and WPBakery do not store your content as clean HTML. They store it as their own shortcodes and settings, wrapped around the content. When you export a page builder site, you often get a wall of bracketed shortcode instead of the words and images you expected. Nothing ports across cleanly, so the content has to be rebuilt page by page rather than imported.

A page builder makes the site easy to edit and hard to leave. That is not an accident.

In practice, a page-builder site adds NZD $1,000 to $4,000 to a migration compared to a clean block-editor build of the same size, because the layout is effectively being rebuilt rather than moved. The upside is that this is the perfect moment to drop the bloat. A page-builder homepage that loads in five seconds becomes a hand-built page that loads in under two, which your visitors and your Google ranking both notice.

Every plugin doing real work is a feature that has to exist on the new platform too. Some map across instantly. Others turn into a small project of their own.

• Forms. Contact Form 7 or Gravity Forms become native forms on the new platform. Usually quick, but custom logic and integrations add time.
• SEO plugins. Yoast or Rank Math hold your titles, meta descriptions, and schema. That data has to be carried across, not left behind, or you lose rankings.
• Membership, booking, or LMS plugins. These are the expensive ones. They hold logic and user data that rarely has a clean equivalent. Budget separately and ask early.
• WooCommerce. Products, variants, customers, and orders all need to move with their history intact. This is a project inside the project.

The rule of thumb: count the plugins that would break the business if they vanished tomorrow. If that number is more than three or four, your migration cost is being set by the plugins, not the page count.

People search for transfer WordPress site to new host and cost to migrate WordPress site meaning two very different jobs, and the price gap between them is large.

If your only complaint is a slow or pricey host, do not pay for a replatform. A host transfer is cheap and sometimes free. If you are tired of updates, security scares, and plugin conflicts, that is a replatform, and the cost reflects the bigger job.

Not everyone is leaving WordPress. Plenty of teams move toward it from an enterprise CMS that has become too expensive or too locked down. The pricing works differently here.

An Optimizely to WordPress migration cost in 2026 typically lands at NZD $14,000 to $40,000 for a 10 to 30 page site, because Optimizely holds content blocks, personalisation rules, and visitor groups that need a WordPress equivalent built from scratch. Craft CMS to WordPress sits at NZD $8,000 to $22,000, since custom field structures and Twig templates have to be re-mapped. These moves are usually paired with a redesign rather than copied across, because the platforms behave so differently that a like-for-like clone rarely makes sense.

The honest take: migrating onto WordPress gives you a familiar, editable platform, but it also hands you the plugin and update maintenance you may have been avoiding. If low maintenance is the goal, a static build is often the better destination than WordPress.

The biggest hidden cost of any WordPress migration is lost Google traffic, and the cheap quotes are cheap because they skip the work that protects it. If your pages drop out of search after a move, our guide to why your website is not showing on Google walks through the recovery.

The mistakes that cost rankings, in order of damage:

1. No 301 redirect map. Every old WordPress URL needs a 301 to the matching new URL. Miss this and Google indexes 404s while your rankings fall.
2. SEO plugin data left behind. The titles, meta descriptions, and schema stored in Yoast or Rank Math have to be migrated, not abandoned to platform defaults.
3. Schema not rebuilt. Article, FAQ, LocalBusiness, and Product schema all need rebuilding on the new platform to keep rich-result eligibility.
4. Permalink structure changes. WordPress permalinks (/blog/post-name) often differ from the new platform's defaults. Map them deliberately or every link breaks at once.
5. Speed regression. Moving from a lean WordPress build to a heavy theme can tank Core Web Vitals. Test mobile speed against the published Core Web Vitals thresholds before and after.

A clean migration loses 0 to 5 percent of organic traffic for one to four weeks, then recovers. A careless one loses 15 to 40 percent for months. Google's own site-move guide covers the minimum redirect and Search Console steps, and the gap between the two outcomes is entirely about whether that work gets done.

Sometimes, yes. A WordPress-to-WordPress host transfer is genuinely DIY-friendly, and most decent hosts offer a free migration plugin or a done-for-you move as a sign-up perk. If the site is small, standard, and staying on WordPress, do not pay for what your host will do for free.

Replatforming is where DIY gets expensive in disguise. The export looks fine, the new site goes live, and three weeks later the enquiries dry up because the redirects were never mapped and half the pages 404. The migration looked free. The lost month of leads was not. A cheap WordPress migration that costs you a quarter of revenue is the most expensive kind there is.

The honest line: DIY a host transfer, get help with a replatform, and if you are unsure which one you actually need, get that judged before you spend anything.

Onyxarro runs WordPress migrations as fixed-price packages with a published scope, so the number does not move once the audit is done. The 48-hour go-live applies to like-for-like moves of standard small business sites.

If you would rather have a fit-and-budget read on your specific site, our free 48-hour audit reads your current WordPress build and target platform, then returns whether a host transfer, a like-for-like move, or a full rebuild is the right call, with the fixed price for each. See full Onyxarro packages.

The cleaner the brief, the tighter the quote, and the smaller the chance of mid-project surprises. Send these before asking for a price:

1. Current site URL and whether it uses a page builder (Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, Beaver Builder) or the block editor.
2. Plugin list, flagging the ones the business would break without.
3. Target platform and the real reason for the move (cost, speed, security, maintenance, design).
4. Page count, and product count if WooCommerce.
5. Top 10 most-trafficked URLs from Search Console. These are the redirects you cannot afford to miss.
6. Whether it is like-for-like or a redesign, plus any brand work needed.

A studio that asks for these before quoting is doing the job properly. One that quotes without seeing your plugin list is quoting a different website than the one you own.

WordPress migration cost in 2026 runs NZD $1,700 to $40,000, but the spread is rarely about page count. It is about the page builder, the plugin stack, and the target platform. A clean block-editor site moves cheaply. A six-year-old Divi build with a WooCommerce store and forty plugins does not, and any quote that ignores that is guessing.

Match the job to the need. If hosting is the only complaint, transfer the host and keep your money. If WordPress itself is the problem, replatform properly, with redirects, schema, and SEO data carried across, so you do not trade a maintenance headache for six months of lost traffic.

If you want a clear read on your specific WordPress site, get the free 48-hour Onyxarro audit. We tell you whether to transfer, migrate, or rebuild, and quote the fixed price for each.