WordPress to Next.js migration: cost, timeline, and what decides both

The cost of a WordPress to Next.js migration depends far less on Next.js than on the WordPress site you are leaving: how its content is stored, which plugins do real work, and how many URLs Google has indexed over the years. My migrations of sites that already rank start at $4,000 (£3,000, €3,600, AED 14,500), and a typical content or brochure site takes four to eight weeks. This guide explains what moves a quote above that starting point, and how to tell whether the move is worth making at all.

Should you migrate at all?

First, a more basic question: is it worth doing? A move from WordPress to Next.js tends to pay off when:

• the site is slow and the speed problems come from the theme and plugins rather than from hosting,
• plugin updates keep breaking things, or security patches have become a regular job,
• you need features, such as a customer portal or a custom calculator, that WordPress plugins do badly.

It is often not worth it when:

• the site is already fast, stable, and easy for your team to update,
• several people publish every day and depend on WordPress editing features you would have to rebuild,
• the real problem is content or design, which a new framework does not fix on its own.

A well-cached WordPress site can be fast, and a badly built Next.js site can be slow. The speed comes from how the new site is built, not from the name of the framework.

What decides the cost

1. How the content is stored

Posts written in the standard block editor export cleanly. Pages built with a visual page builder often do not: the content comes out wrapped in builder-specific shortcodes and markup that has to be cleaned up page by page, or rebuilt. A site with 30 page-builder pages can take longer to move than one with 300 plain posts.

2. Custom post types and custom fields

Products, team members, locations, case studies, and anything stored in custom fields need a matching content model on the new site, plus templates to display them. Each one adds design and build time, and the work is in mapping the fields correctly, not in copying text.

3. Plugins that do real work

List every active plugin and mark the ones that provide something a visitor uses: forms, bookings, search, memberships, multilingual pages, or a shop. Each of those needs a replacement on the new site, either another service or custom code. Plugins that only tidy up the admin area or add caching usually disappear without a replacement.

4. The number of URLs to map

WordPress creates more indexable addresses than most owners realise: tag and category archives, date and author archives, attachment pages for uploaded images, feeds, paginated lists, and the image files themselves under /wp-content/uploads. Each indexed URL needs a decision and, usually, a redirect. A site the owner thinks of as 40 pages can turn out to have several hundred URLs once it is crawled, and the redirect map grows with it.

5. What the SEO plugin was doing

Yoast or Rank Math has been writing your page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, structured data, and sitemaps for years. All of that output has to be rebuilt in the new templates, and checked page by page for the pages that rank. It is quiet work and it is where careless migrations lose traffic.

6. Who edits content afterwards

There are two main paths. Headless WordPress keeps the WordPress admin exactly as your editors know it, and the Next.js site reads the content from it. Or the content moves to a different content system, or into the site's code if it rarely changes. Headless keeps editors happy but means you still host and update a WordPress install. Moving off it entirely saves that cost but changes how your team works. Deciding this first matters, because everything else is built around it.

7. WooCommerce

A store is a bigger job than a content site. Product, category, and filter URLs multiply quickly, and checkout has to keep working the whole time. A common approach is to move the storefront to Next.js while checkout and order management stay on WooCommerce behind the scenes. That is scoped after the crawl shows how many product URLs exist.

How long it takes

Four to eight weeks for a typical content or brochure site, and longer for a WooCommerce store with a large catalogue. The first week goes on the crawl and the redirect map, and it sets the pace for everything after it. Sites with years of plugins, tag archives, and attachment pages take longer to map than their page count suggests.

Launch is not the end. I check the site 48 hours, two weeks, and six weeks after launch: the redirects, Search Console's indexing reports, and rankings for the searches that mattered before. That checking is part of the job, not an extra.

Running costs after the move

A Next.js site usually runs on Vercel or a similar host for a small monthly fee, with no PHP server to patch and no premium plugin licences to renew. If you choose headless WordPress, remember that the WordPress install still needs hosting and updates, so that cost shrinks rather than disappears.

How to get an accurate quote

Any developer can quote more accurately if you can send:

• the site address, so it can be crawled,
• a list of active plugins, with the ones visitors actually use marked,
• whether your team needs to keep editing in WordPress,
• whether the design is changing at the same time or staying as it is.

On that last point: moving the platform first and redesigning afterwards is slower but much safer for a site with traffic worth protecting, because if rankings move you can tell which change caused it. The redesign checklist explains why.

To see what a rebuild would trip over on your site, run the free migration risk check. It looks at the canonical host, indexability, redirect chains, structured data, and WordPress upload paths. For how I handle the move itself, see the WordPress to Next.js migration service, or send me the site for a quote.