How Much Does a WordPress to Next.js Migration Cost? Pricing Breakdown for 2026

You ask three different agencies to quote your WordPress to Next.js migration and get back three wildly different numbers: $3,500, $18,000, and $52,000. All three say they'll handle SEO. None of them define what that means. This is the normal state of the migration market, and it costs site owners real money when they pick the wrong quote for the wrong reasons.

The truth is that migration cost is a function of a few concrete variables — and once you understand them, you can evaluate any quote in about 20 minutes. This post breaks down exactly what drives migration pricing, why fixed-scope beats hourly every time, and what our own pricing model looks like so you can make an informed decision before signing anything.

WordPress to Next.js migrations are not commodity work. The cost range — $490 for an audit up to $50,000+ for a large enterprise rebuild — reflects real differences in scope, not vendor markup. Understanding what you're actually paying for is the first step to budgeting correctly and avoiding a migration that destroys traffic instead of improving it.

Quick Checklist

Count your unique page templates (not total pages — templates determine rebuild scope)
Estimate your total URL count (affects redirect mapping scope)
List custom functionality that must survive (forms, search, integrations)
Ask any agency: is SEO parity included, or is it an add-on?
Confirm pricing is fixed-scope (not hourly, which always overruns)
Budget for the audit first — it defines the rebuild scope accurately

Why Migration Costs Vary So Wildly ($2K–$50K+)

The $2,000–$50,000+ spread is not random. It reflects three fundamentally different types of work being sold under the same label.

At the low end, you have template migrations — a developer takes your existing WordPress theme, converts it to React components, and calls it done. There is no SEO audit, no redirect mapping, no schema verification. If it looks right in the browser, it ships. These projects fail SEO parity tests constantly because the developers involved don't know what SEO parity means. The site looks fine and loses 30% of its traffic within 90 days.

At the high end, you have enterprise engagements with dedicated project managers, content migration teams, QA sprints, and months of post-launch monitoring. For a 10,000-page e-commerce site with custom integrations, that price is justified. For a 40-page B2B site, it's absurd.

The middle of the market — $8,000 to $25,000 — is where most professional migrations land for small-to-medium WordPress sites. The meaningful variation in that range comes from template count, custom functionality, content volume, and whether SEO parity is a core deliverable or an afterthought.

The agencies quoting $2,000 for a "full migration" are either cutting corners on SEO or underestimating scope and planning to invoice change orders. Both outcomes hurt you.

The Variables That Determine Your Migration Cost

Number of Page Templates (Not Total Pages)

This is the most important variable and the one most site owners misunderstand. A WordPress site with 500 blog posts and 8 core page types has 8 templates to rebuild — not 500. A site with 50 pages but 22 custom Elementor layouts has 22 templates to rebuild.

Template count drives development time. Each unique layout needs to be analyzed, deconstructed, and rebuilt as a React component in Next.js. A simple blog post template might take 4–6 hours. A complex landing page with animated sections, conditional content blocks, and integration with a marketing automation tool might take 20–40 hours.

Before you request any quote, audit your own site: open each unique page type and list what makes it structurally different from the others. That list is your template inventory, and it is the most accurate proxy for rebuild complexity.

Content Volume and CMS complexity

Content volume affects two separate cost buckets: redirect mapping and content migration.

Redirect mapping scales with URL count. A 100-URL site needs a carefully maintained redirect map to ensure that every old URL resolves cleanly to its new equivalent. A 5,000-URL site needs automated tooling, crawl analysis, and post-launch monitoring. Redirect mapping is not optional — it is how you preserve link equity and ensure that bookmarked or linked pages don't 404 after launch.

Content migration — moving posts, pages, and media from WordPress to your new headless CMS — can be automated for clean WordPress exports or manual for sites with heavy customization. Heavily customized sites (custom post types, ACF fields, complex taxonomies) require more migration work. Factor this in when comparing quotes.

Custom Functionality (Forms, Calculators, Integrations)

Every piece of custom functionality is a discrete rebuild scope item. A contact form powered by Gravity Forms needs to be rebuilt or replaced with a Next.js-compatible form solution. A mortgage calculator needs to be rebuilt in React. A WooCommerce integration needs a replacement commerce architecture.

Inventory your custom functionality before requesting quotes. For each item, define whether you need a like-for-like rebuild, a replacement with a SaaS tool, or a full custom rebuild. The answer dramatically changes cost. A Gravity Forms replacement with a simple API-connected form might cost $500. A full custom checkout rebuild might cost $15,000.

SEO Parity Requirements (Redirects, Schema, Monitoring)

SEO parity is not a checkbox. It is a systematic process that includes pre-migration crawl analysis, redirect map construction and testing, metadata migration verification, structured data (schema) preservation and enhancement, Core Web Vitals benchmarking, and post-launch monitoring to catch indexing issues before they compound.

Agencies that include SEO parity as a line item in their proposal understand what they're selling. Agencies that mention "SEO-friendly" in their pitch without defining deliverables are telling you it's not really included. Ask for a specific list of SEO deliverables before you sign. If they can't produce one, the SEO work is not actually in scope.

Full SEO parity work on a small-to-medium site typically adds $1,500–$4,000 to a migration project. That investment protects the traffic that makes the site valuable in the first place. Skipping it to save money on the project often costs far more in lost revenue within the first six months.

Hourly Billing vs Fixed-Scope Pricing (And Why We Do Fixed)

Hourly billing is the standard model in web development. It is also the model most likely to produce budget overruns on migration projects.

Here is why: migrations surface unexpected complexity mid-project. A plugin that looked simple turns out to have 15 custom post types feeding a complex relational structure. A theme that looked clean has undocumented JavaScript dependencies that break without WordPress's global jQuery. Hourly billing passes that discovery risk directly to you. Every unexpected hour is another invoice line.

Fixed-scope pricing requires the agency to do the discovery work upfront — before the proposal — so they are pricing actual scope, not estimated scope. When scope is well-defined, fixed pricing protects you from runaway costs. When scope is not well-defined, no pricing model helps you, because you don't actually know what you're buying.

This is why our process starts with an audit, not a proposal. The $490 SEO Parity Audit produces the information required to scope a rebuild accurately. It inventories templates, URLs, custom functionality, SEO assets, and technical debt. The audit output is the input to an accurate fixed-scope proposal. Without it, any agency quoting you a fixed price is guessing — and either padding the price to cover the unknown or planning to change-order you when the unknowns surface.

SEOParity's Pricing Model: Audit → Rebuild → Ops

Our pricing is structured in three stages that match the natural progression of a migration project.

The SEO Parity Audit — $490. This is where every engagement starts. We crawl your WordPress site, inventory every template, URL, piece of custom functionality, and SEO asset, then produce a written report that defines exactly what a migration requires and what risks need to be mitigated. The audit is a deliverable in itself — you could take it to any agency and use it to get accurate quotes. If you proceed with us, the $490 applies as credit toward the rebuild.

The Rebuild — from $4,500. Rebuild pricing is fixed-scope and proposal-based. The audit defines scope; the proposal prices it. A simple informational site with 5–8 templates, under 100 URLs, and no custom functionality typically falls in the $4,500–$8,000 range. A more complex site with custom integrations, larger URL count, and multiple template types typically falls in the $8,000–$18,000 range. Large or highly custom sites are quoted individually. Every rebuild includes full SEO parity: redirect mapping, metadata migration, schema preservation, and 90-day post-launch monitoring.

Ops — $750/month. Post-launch operations cover ongoing monitoring, Core Web Vitals tracking, indexing health checks, and technical SEO support. This is designed for teams that want ongoing assurance that their Next.js site continues to perform at the level the migration achieved.

For a detailed breakdown of what's included in our migration service, see our full service overview. For a comparison of the platforms themselves before you commit, see our post on WordPress vs Next.js for SEO.

What You Should Ask Any Migration Agency Before Signing

Before you sign any migration contract, work through this list. The answers will tell you quickly whether the agency understands SEO parity or is treating it as a marketing phrase.

What does "SEO-friendly" mean in your proposal? Push for a specific deliverables list. Redirect mapping, metadata migration, structured data preservation, and post-launch indexing monitoring are the minimum. If they can't name these specifically, SEO parity is not in scope.

Is your price fixed or hourly? If hourly, ask for an estimate and a not-to-exceed cap. If they won't commit to a cap, your budget exposure is unlimited.

How do you handle scope changes? Every migration surfaces some unexpected complexity. Understand the change order process before you sign, not after you're mid-project.

How did you arrive at this price? A well-scoped proposal should be traceable to concrete inputs: template count, URL count, custom functionality inventory, SEO requirements. If the quote feels like a round number that wasn't derived from anything, it wasn't.

What does post-launch support look like? The first 90 days after a migration launch are when problems surface. Indexing drops, unexpected 404s, Core Web Vitals regressions — these need fast response. Understand what support is included and for how long.

Do you have examples of migrations where SEO rankings held or improved? Traffic data from before and after launch is the only real proof. Ask for it.

Who actually does the work? Some agencies front senior staff in sales and hand projects off to junior contractors. Know who will be working on your site.

These questions take 30 minutes to ask and can save you from signing a contract with a vendor who will cost you significantly more in lost traffic than you paid them for the migration.

FAQ

Why do WordPress to Next.js migration quotes vary so much between agencies?

Quotes vary because agencies are scoping different things. One agency might quote only the development work; another includes SEO parity, redirect mapping, and post-launch monitoring. One agency does discovery upfront; another estimates and adjusts with change orders. The only way to compare quotes accurately is to ensure each proposal covers the same scope — which requires a clear scope document, ideally from a pre-migration audit.

Is fixed-scope pricing better than hourly for a site migration?

Fixed-scope pricing is better for you as the buyer because it puts the risk of unexpected complexity on the agency, not on you. The caveat is that fixed scope only works when the scope is actually well-defined. A fixed price based on a rough estimate is not better than hourly — it's just a number that will be adjusted through change orders. True fixed-scope pricing requires upfront discovery work to define the project accurately before pricing begins.

What's the cheapest way to migrate from WordPress to Next.js?

The cheapest responsible path is to start with an audit, scope only what you need, and use a fixed-scope proposal to control costs. Cutting costs by skipping SEO parity is a false economy — a migration that drops your traffic 30% costs far more than the money saved on a cheaper agency. The cheapest outcome is a migration done once, correctly, with full SEO continuity.

Does the SEO Parity Audit cost apply as credit toward the full rebuild?

Yes. The $490 audit fee applies as a credit toward the rebuild project if you proceed with us. The audit is also a standalone deliverable — a written inventory and risk assessment you own regardless of what you do next. Many clients use it to get accurate quotes from multiple agencies, then return to us having seen how other agencies respond to a well-defined scope document.

What happens if the scope changes during the migration?

Scope changes during a fixed-scope engagement are handled through a written change order process. If a discovery mid-project reveals functionality or complexity not covered in the original audit — a hidden custom post type, an undocumented integration — we document the addition, agree on pricing, and proceed. Because we start with a thorough audit, mid-project surprises are uncommon. When they do occur, the process is transparent and agreed before work continues.

Next Steps

The most useful thing you can do right now is get an accurate picture of your site's migration scope. That starts with the $490 SEO Parity Audit — it defines exactly what a migration requires, identifies the SEO risks that need mitigation, and produces the scope document that makes any proposal accurate.

If you already know you want to move forward and want to understand pricing before commissioning the audit, we're happy to provide a ballpark based on a brief site review. But the audit is still the right starting point — it protects you from both undershooting scope and overpaying for work you don't need.

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