How much should I pay to migrate my website?

Depends on the provider category and the site's complexity. Overseas freelancers charge $150–$800 and skip many steps. Domestic freelancers charge $1,500–$5,000 for small business sites. Specialist services like SiteShiftCo charge $890–$4,000 for packaged migrations to coded sites. Full-service agencies charge $5,000–$25,000 for complex migrations with design work. Expect to pay more for SEO-sensitive migrations, ecommerce, or sites with many pages.

What should be included in a website migration service?

Every migration should include: full content migration, URL preservation with 301 redirect mapping, SEO metadata preservation (titles, descriptions, schema markup, sitemap), form replacement, DNS cutover coordination, post-launch verification, and at least a short support period. Design refreshes, custom integrations, and content rewriting are often extra. Always confirm what's included in writing before signing off on a quote.

What are the biggest red flags when hiring a migration service?

Can't explain their 301 redirect approach in plain terms. Refuses to provide a written scope or fixed quote. Doesn't know what schema markup is or how to preserve it. No portfolio of similar migrations. Pricing that seems suspiciously low. Requires the old site to be decommissioned before the new site is verified. Won't hand over the source code or repository. Any of these is a signal to walk away.

Should I hire a freelancer or a specialist service?

Freelancers vary enormously in quality. A known, experienced freelancer is often excellent and cost-effective; an unknown freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork is a gamble. Specialist services offer packaged scope, predictable pricing, and consistent process, at a small premium. For a small business migration with meaningful SEO equity at stake, a specialist service is usually the lower-risk choice. For a personal site or a low-stakes migration, a freelancer is often fine.

How long does hiring a website migration take?

Specialist services typically complete small business migrations in 2–4 weeks elapsed time. Domestic freelancers take 4–8 weeks depending on availability. Full-service agencies take 6–12 weeks including discovery and design phases. Overseas freelancer timelines vary widely. Your hands-on time is usually limited to content review, design approval, and a go-live coordination window.

Can SEO rankings drop after hiring someone to migrate my site?

Yes, if the migration is done poorly, missing redirects, changed URL structures without redirect mapping, lost metadata. A properly executed migration preserves rankings, often improving them due to better performance on the new platform. Ask any service specifically how they handle 301 redirects, meta preservation, and post-launch verification. A service that can't answer these questions confidently is the risk.

What questions should I ask before hiring a migration service?

Walk me through your process. How do you handle 301 redirects? What's your SEO preservation checklist? Do I get the source code and repository? What's the timeline? What's not included? What happens if rankings drop after migration? How do I edit the site after you're done? Do you have similar migrations I can review? Who does the work, you or a team? What support is included post-launch?

How to choose a website migration service

Hiring someone to migrate your website is not a commodity decision. Provider quality varies from “$200, skip most of the work” to “$25,000, white-glove full-service,” and the right choice depends on the size of your site, how much SEO equity is on the line, and how much ongoing control you want afterward.

This guide covers the provider categories with realistic price ranges, what every migration should include, red flags to watch for, and the specific questions that separate good providers from bad ones.

Categories of providers

Website migration services fall into roughly five categories. Each has different strengths, pricing, and typical failure modes.

Overseas freelancer (Fiverr, Upwork)

Price range: $150–$800

What they typically do well: Move content. Rebuild basic pages. Follow instructions.

What they typically miss: SEO preservation (redirects, schema, metadata). Technical SEO audits. Form replacement that actually works. Post-launch verification.

Best for: Personal sites, hobby projects, low-stakes migrations where you’ll handle the SEO parts yourself.

Red flags specific to this category: Very fast turnaround promises (“migrated in 48 hours”). No portfolio of similar migrations. Communication only via platform messaging. Refuses to provide a written scope.

Domestic freelancer

Price range: $1,500–$5,000

What they typically do well: Understand your context. Communicate well. Handle the full scope if they have the right skills. Often cost-competitive for experienced freelancers.

What they typically miss: Consistency. Quality varies wildly freelancer-to-freelancer. Post-launch support may be ad-hoc depending on their availability.

Best for: Small business sites when you have a specific freelancer recommended by someone you trust. Not ideal for cold-hiring from general listings.

Red flags specific to this category: No concrete portfolio. Won’t provide references. Scope keeps expanding during the project. Requires large deposits before any work.

Specialist migration service

Price range: $890–$4,000 for packaged small business migrations

What they typically do well: Predictable scope. Clear pricing. Consistent process across projects. Usually focused on one destination type (e.g., coded sites, Webflow, or headless setups).

What they typically miss: Flexibility for very custom requirements. Services built around fixed packages may charge extra for anything outside the standard scope.

Best for: Small business migrations with standard requirements, brochure sites, service sites, content-led sites with blogs.

Examples: SiteShiftCo (migrations to coded sites, $890 Starter / $1,900+ Core), and similar focused services targeting specific migration types.

Red flags specific to this category: Services with no named people behind them. Vague “turnkey” promises without specific deliverables.

Full-service agency

Price range: $5,000–$25,000

What they typically do well: Complex migrations involving design changes, brand work, multi-language, integrations. Account management and project coordination. Enterprise compliance and documentation.

What they typically miss: Cost-efficiency for small businesses. The process overhead that justifies their price is often wasted on a brochure site migration.

Best for: Mid-market companies, sites with complex ecommerce, multi-site migrations, or migrations combined with significant brand or design work.

Red flags specific to this category: Long discovery phases that don’t produce useful outputs. Subcontracted work without disclosure. Large upfront payments before work starts.

Platform partner (Webflow-certified, Squarespace Circle, etc.)

Price range: $3,000–$10,000

What they typically do well: Deep expertise in one platform. Often official recognition or training. Good for intra-platform migrations or migrations to that platform.

What they typically miss: Objectivity about whether that platform is actually the right choice. A Webflow-certified partner is unlikely to recommend leaving Webflow.

Best for: Migrating to a specific platform (Webflow Experts for Webflow, Shopify Plus Partners for Shopify).

Red flags specific to this category: Recommending the platform regardless of fit. Selling hosting or services that weren’t in the original scope.

What should be included in any migration

Regardless of provider category, these items should be in scope for any migration worth paying for:

Full content migration, every page, blog post, image, and document
URL structure preservation, new URLs match old URLs where possible, with a comprehensive 301 redirect map where they don’t
SEO metadata preservation, meta titles, descriptions, canonical tags, schema markup (JSON-LD), sitemap, robots.txt
Form replacement, forms on the new platform, tested, with submissions routed correctly
DNS cutover coordination, planned cutover window, TTL reduction beforehand, verification after
SSL certificate setup, HTTPS working on the new site before cutover
Post-launch verification, redirect testing, sitemap submission to Search Console, monitoring for errors
Short support period, at least 14–30 days of fixes included for issues discovered post-launch

These are table stakes. A provider that treats any of these as “extra” is underselling and is likely to cut corners.

What’s usually extra (and how to price it)

These items are commonly excluded from base migrations and priced separately. Knowing that upfront avoids surprise charges:

Design refresh or redesign, a full brand/design update is a separate project, usually $2,000–$10,000+
Content rewriting, copywriting is almost never included; providers migrate what exists
Custom integrations, bookings systems, ecommerce, membership platforms, CRM sync
Multi-language setup, internationalization adds significant scope
Advanced SEO consulting, content strategy and keyword-level optimization beyond technical preservation
Training on the new stack, sometimes included, sometimes charged separately
Ongoing maintenance, post-launch support beyond the initial period is a separate service

Red flags worth walking away from

Regardless of category, these are signals to decline:

Can’t explain 301 redirects in plain terms. Redirects are the single most important SEO element of any migration. If a provider treats them as an afterthought, rankings will suffer.
No written scope or fixed quote. Verbal quotes and “we’ll figure it out as we go” leads to scope creep and disputes.
Doesn’t know what schema markup is. Modern SEO requires structured data. A provider unfamiliar with it will strip this on migration.
Pricing that seems too low. If someone offers a $300 migration that competitors charge $2,000 for, something is being skipped, usually the SEO work.
Requires the old site offline before the new one is verified. This removes your fallback if something goes wrong. No competent provider requires this.
Won’t hand over source code or repository. If the migration produces a site you can’t leave or maintain independently, you’ve just traded one lock-in for another.
No portfolio of similar migrations. Experience matters for migrations. Ask to see specific examples close to your situation.
Communication only through a platform’s messaging system. For a $2,000+ project, direct email contact and occasional voice conversations are reasonable expectations.

Questions to ask before hiring

Use this list in initial conversations with any provider. The confidence and specificity of their answers is often more revealing than the answers themselves.

Can you walk me through your migration process from start to finish?
How do you handle 301 redirects? Do you map every existing URL?
What’s your SEO preservation checklist?
Do I get the source code and repository? Can I leave any host I want after?
What’s the timeline, and what’s the timeline for each phase?
What’s explicitly not included in your scope?
What happens if search rankings drop after migration?
How do I edit the site after you’re done?
Can you show me similar migrations you’ve done recently?
Who actually does the work, you, or a team? Is any of it subcontracted?
What support is included post-launch, and for how long?
How do payments work, deposit, milestones, on completion?

A provider who answers these confidently, specifically, and without defensiveness is usually a good choice regardless of price.

Realistic price anchoring

If a provider quotes significantly below market rate, something is being skipped:

Site type	Realistic specialist range	Realistic agency range
Brochure site, 5–10 pages, no blog	$800–$2,500	$5,000–$8,000
Small business site with blog (up to 30 posts)	$1,500–$3,500	$7,000–$12,000
Content-led site with blog (up to 150 posts)	$2,500–$6,000	$10,000–$18,000
Small ecommerce site	$3,000–$8,000	$12,000–$25,000
Complex site with integrations or member areas	$5,000–$15,000	$18,000–$40,000

DIY is cheaper in dollars but consumes 20–60 hours of your time, and carries higher risk of SEO issues if you’re new to migration.

How to make the final decision

Get quotes from at least two providers in the same category, specialist vs specialist, agency vs agency. Comparing across categories tells you less.
Ask the same questions to each.
Request a written scope listing every deliverable.
Check references or at least ask for 2–3 links to live sites they’ve migrated in the last year.
Trust specificity over promises. “We’ll preserve your SEO” is generic. “We’ll map every URL via a 301 redirect table, re-implement your schema markup as JSON-LD, and verify on launch with Screaming Frog and Search Console” is specific.
Match price to stakes. A personal site can tolerate a $300 freelancer; a business-critical site should not.

Where SiteShiftCo fits

In the specialist service category, focused specifically on migrations from Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, or WordPress to coded sites.

Starter: $790, brochure sites up to 15 pages, 30 blog posts. Full SEO preservation, 301 redirect mapping, form replacement, DNS cutover.
Core: from $1,470, content-led sites up to 30 pages, 150 blog posts, integrations. Wix migrations sit here because the export is weaker and more is rebuilt manually.
Signature: from $3,500, pixel-match redesigns, large content archives, commerce, bespoke design, multi-language or multi-region scope.

The model: one-time build, you own the code, near-zero recurring cost afterward. Not every site is a fit, heavy ecommerce, large membership sites, and custom applications are often better served by other providers.

See Is this a good fit for you? on the homepage for specific criteria, or get a quote.

Should you migrate yourself or hire someone?, honest DIY-vs-hire comparison
The real cost of Squarespace over 3 years, cost comparison that drives migration decisions
How to migrate from Squarespace to a coded site, the full migration walkthrough
Squarespace alternatives, if you’re still deciding where to go
Glossary: Site migration, 301 redirect, Schema markup