What if your website starts getting more traffic than you imagined?
Suddenly, your website infrastructure becomes weak. Customer demands must be met, and your site must deliver a top-notch user experience.
It’s a nightmare for any website owner, but here’s one thing—it’s not the end of the journey. Website migration could be the best solution to seamlessly upscaling, ensuring your website keeps up with traffic and meets customers’ requirements.
Website migration or re-platforming involves moving your website from one platform to another while maintaining data, content, media, and other essential elements.
However, with significant change comes considerable cost. Understanding the expenses involved in a website migration in 2025 can help you make an informed decision so you don’t get caught off guard when expanding your business online.
What is Website Migration?
The term suggests migration means moving a site from one platform to another. This transition can involve changing the domain name, servers, hosting providers, or even a shift in a website structure and technology stack. The solid reasons behind website migration are unique, ranging from a wish to improve website speed and security to the need for a more robust and scalable hosting solution.
Various factors can drive website migration, such as a more scalable hosting option or increased performance and security.
Rebranding, boosting security, optimizing site performance, or implementing a new content management system are typical reasons for migrations. Additionally, you may transfer to enhance user experience or more efficiently scale your website. To achieve success, a customised strategy is needed for each reason.
Proper planning and a detailed roadmap are compulsory. Strategic action can help you avoid losing search engine ranking and content or causing a site’s downfall. A correctly done migration minimizes downtime and maintains your SEO efforts by guaranteeing that your website stays operational and accessible.
Factors Influencing the Cost of a Website Migration
Website migration costs are multifaceted and require a detailed budgeting approach. Yes, the question often looms large. They vary significantly, leaving many wondering what drives these disparities. Let’s examine factors and their impact on migration costs.
Lack of Flexibility in the Current Hosting Environment
In essence, while using a rigid platform or a server that is being shared with other websites, the issue of scalability arises exponentially. With traffic growth, the current hosting mechanism cannot meet the capacity required or may even experience downtimes.
Impact on Cost
To solve this, one must upgrade to a solution that can accommodate such problems as a dedicated server or cloud hosting. The move to a more flexible, higher-performance system usually includes data migration, setup changes to the servers that host the system, and possibly system enhancements. These technical steps require more time than well-structured procedures and may also cost more due to the involvement of an expert team.
Complex Website Architecture with Multiple Integrations
Every migration project involves certain risks, and websites with intricate architecture, such as eCommerce stores, membership sites, or integration of APIs with third parties, are relatively tough and risky to migrate. Customer accounts, custom features, and many others must also work correctly after the migration, which is not a joke.
To understand these challenges better, check out our blog on Common Risks of Website Migration, where we discuss potential pitfalls and how to mitigate them effectively.
Impact on Cost
If your site is large and encompasses several sections, the migration process will be more prolonged and costly. After moving to the new server, every integration must be tested and validated, frequently requiring additional developers and specialists.
For instance, eCommerce platform migration with particular checkout flows or payment integrations will increase the overall cost because of the time needed to verify their proper functionality and avoid lost profits from non-working checkouts.
SEO and Traffic Disruption
Lack of good SEO management during migration leads to broken links, loss of backlinks, and changes in URL structure, which hinders organic traffic and search engine ranking positions. This is a problem for businesses that solely depend on organic traffic.
Impact on Cost
Such expenses can be significant in the case of migration since SEO specialists should pay close attention to 301 redirects, meta tags, speed, etc. This could also include the costs of reindexing, content audits, and any extra time spent monitoring migration’s effects on SEO.
Data Security and Privacy Concerns
Sharing customer data—personal data, payment info, or any other information vital to a business—poses the threat of data leakage or non-adherence to the GDPR or HIPAA during migration.
Impact on Cost
This means that once security concerns are addressed, the cost of migration will rise enormously. It will require several things, such as encryption, data transfer, and external audit.
Insufficient Time for a Smooth Transition
Rushed migrations typically result in errors, downtime, or performance issues. If the migration is not adequately planned and tested, the website may experience prolonged downtime, leading to lost sales and customer dissatisfaction.
Impact on Cost
However, a clear migration timeline, testing and phased rollouts help avoid such disruptions while incorporating higher costs. The longer the process, the more they must devote to development resources and hosting after the transition.
In sum, every problem that originates during website migration, be it hosting problems, complicated site architecture, SEO complications, or information security threats, merely superimposes additional levels of challenge and costs onto the process. The above sections focus on knowing about these factors and how they influence the total cost of migration so that you can have proper planning and estimation.
How Much Does It Cost To Migrate A Website In 2025?
You have decided to migrate a website. Various factors may trigger the final decision, such as a change in your website design goals, the scalability of your business, or a desire to use a modern and feature-proof platform.
Whatever reasons and objectives you pursue while adopting the decision to switch to another service, you will surely encounter certain questions, such as :
- What migration option is preferable?
- How much does it cost to re-platform your readymade project from one platform to another?
Don’t worry; in this section, you will get an answer to how much website migration costs.
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Cost of Migrating to a New Hosting Provider
When considering a switch to a new hosting provider, the point may be sensitive in terms of cost based on the hosting provider you choose.
For instance, moving from a shared hosting plan to a more complex VPS or dedicated server could triple the expenses.
- One commonly used hosting service provider is Bluehost, which offers shared hosting for $2.95/month.
- There are two types of VPS hosting: high frequency, which costs $18.99 – $49.99/month, and standard, which costs $55.99 – $95.99/month.
- GoDaddy offers the same shared hosting service for $5.99/month, and VPS starts at $19.99/month.
Cost of Migrating to a New CMS
Moving from one CMS to another can be one of the costlier migration options due to the challenges of moving content, data, and functionality. CMS migration involves transferring text, media, custom features, plugins, and integrations that may not be compatible with the new platform.
For instance, migrating from Drupal to Shopify could require a professional technology partner to handle all the technical chaos.- The cost of migrating between CMSs varies, but on average, small—and medium-sized websites may spend between $1000 and $5000 on a CMS migration.
- Large websites with custom-built themes, heavy plugins, and integrations could increase this cost to $10,000 or more.
Cost of Migrating to a New Website Builder
Moving to a new website builder may incur unforeseen costs, especially when shifting from a highly customised solution to a rigid set of tools.
For example, if you are moving away from WordPress to Wix or Squarespace, you might have to recreate some features since those solutions are more limited than WordPress provides.
- Generally, this migration costs around $500 for a small site, but it could rise to as much as $2,000 or more for a big website.
- That said, it is also now standard practice to want to change the domain name while conducting such a migration.
- If so, other extra costs will be incurred, such as the annual charge for registering a new domain—usually $10-20 per year—and possibly charges for professional or expert services for SEO management and other redirection issues.
Many website builders offer free website migration tools, but the process can only cause SEO problems with professional help. Given the size of the website and the degree of migration, the total cost of moving to a new website domain and builder is expected to be between one thousand and five thousand dollars.
Cost of Migrating to a New Domain
Changing your website’s domain name is more complex than it sounds-it comes with many hidden costs, especially for site owners who depend on organic traffic or have built an established online presence.
- First is the purchase cost for a new domain name, which can range from $10 to $50 a year, depending on the registrar and the name’s popularity.
- Another step in migrating your current domain is creating 301 redirects so that all the pages that exist on it now will be rerouted to their new domain positions.
However, changing the domain will also require updating internal links, social media accounts, email addresses, and third-party integrations.
This process can take a few hours for a simple site to weeks for larger, more intricate sites. Depending on the size and complexity of the site, using professionals to ensure smoother migration can cost between $500 and $2,500.
Changing the site’s domain could also require purchasing a new theme or upgrading plugins for each instance using platforms such as Shopify or WordPress, which adds to the total cost incurred during a domain change.
Cost of Migrating to a Local Server
Transferring to a self-hosted, on-premise infrastructure is a considerable but strategic commitment for businesses seeking greater control of their hosting environment. Unlike cloud or shared hosting, a local server setup typically involves purchasing a physical server and a setup and maintenance infrastructure.
- Depending on the server and other resource requirements, the initial setup costs for local servers can range from $2,000 to $10,000 or more.
- In addition to hardware, recurring costs will include electricity, maintenance, security, and the number of professionals overseeing the server.
If internal expertise in server management is lacking, website maintenance services will be required. Depending on the necessary server and support, this could add anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 monthly.
Moreover, migrating to such a server involves extensive configuration and data transfer processes. Engaging specialists to oversee the entire process from start to completion, whether moving from a cloud-based hosting provider or one type of infrastructure setup to another, could add between $1,000 and $3,000 to migration services fees. This is especially true for giant websites requiring high availability and failover systems to guarantee business continuity.
In short, the cost of website migration can be influenced by multiple factors and circumstances. By shaking hands with the right technology provider and migration experts, you can minimise downtime and costs and anticipate fruitful results for your website’s new home.
Start Planning Your Migration Today with WebyKing
From planning to implementation, a lot goes into migrating a website. But it can be a smooth and easy process with the right team, planning, and approach.
WebyKing has a team of website professionals who can help you plan your website migration and make the process seamless while reducing downtime and website performance. After reading the above costing factors and details, you can now easily estimate the budget for your website migration by identifying the type of migration you want and the process you must follow to achieve better output.
Frequently Asked Questions on Shopify Migration
1. Which of the factors determine the cost of website migration in the year 2025?
The cost of website migration in the year 2025 does depend on the following factors: the size and complexity of the website, the platform or CMS that is being migrated, whether it is design migration, content migration, SEO migration, or a full platform migration and business downtime if any is expected.
2. Is website migration cost higher in 2025 than in previous years?
Website migration costs have risen a little now and then, resulting from factors such as developing superior technologies, more complicated websites, and pressure towards better features like UX and mobile optimisation.
3. Can I manage a website migration by myself, or should I seek the services of experts?
If your website is simple, you can perform a basic migration yourself, but if it has tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, we always recommend seeking professional help.
4. How long is a conventional website migration in 2025?
Thus, the time needed to complete the migration process strongly depends on the size and specificity of the website. Regarding smaller websites, migration processes may last several days to a week. This will take 2-4 weeks or more on larger and more complex websites or those with unique functionalities, third-party links, and extensive content.
Download Our Comprehensive Website Migration Checklist!
Whether you’re upgrading technology, improving performance, or rebranding your business, this checklist ensures a smooth and successful migration every step of the way. Get Your Free Checklist Now!
