WordPress to Next.js Migration Services

Hire a WordPress Migration Team That Hands You Code You Own

A WordPress to Next.js migration for a 50 to 100 page site runs $5,000 to $25,000 fixed-price and takes 4 to 10 weeks. The price is set after we inventory your site and before you commit, so there is no hourly meter and no surprise invoice.

MigrateLab is a specialist migration service. We move WordPress sites to code you own (Next.js, or Astro when the site is mostly content, with Payload CMS so your editors keep a real editing screen), extract your content through the WordPress REST API, replace each plugin with owned code or a proper service, build a complete 301 redirect map, and hand over a Git repository your team and your AI tools can both work in.

This page is for teams who want to hand the work over. If you would rather run it yourself, read our complete WordPress to Next.js guide instead. Below is what you get, what it costs, what it costs to run afterwards, and when you should not do this at all.

Who This Is For

You are probably reading this because of one of these:

• A plugin update broke something that makes money. Checkout, a lead form, a booking flow. The fix worked, but nobody can promise it will not happen again next month.

• You pay someone every month just to keep it standing. Updates, security patches, compatibility checks. A maintenance retainer that buys stability, not progress.

• Every change waits on a developer. The page builder makes small edits slow, and structural edits risky, so the backlog grows.

• The site was hacked, or nearly was. You cleaned it up and now you want an architecture with fewer doors.

• You want AI to edit the site, and you have found out that a theme plus 20 plugins plus a production database is not something an agent can safely change.

If none of those sound like you, read the section on when you should not hire us, further down. WordPress is fine for plenty of sites.

What a WordPress Migration Actually Involves

Most WordPress sites are older and more tangled than their owners think. The work that decides whether a migration goes well is the part nobody sees on the finished site.

Content comes out through the REST API, not the XML export. The Tools > Export file (WXR) carries posts, pages, terms and custom fields, but attachments arrive as URLs rather than files, and any plugin that stores data in its own tables is not in it at all. We page through /wp-json/wp/v2/ with per_page=100, read the X-WP-TotalPages header to know we have everything, and pull media files directly.

Shortcodes and blocks get converted, not pasted. The rendered content has already executed your shortcodes into plugin-specific HTML. The raw content (behind context=edit with authentication) still contains [gallery], [contact-form-7] and the HTML comments Gutenberg uses to mark each block, such as wp:columns. We parse the raw version and map each shortcode and block type to a real component, so your content stays structured instead of becoming a blob of old WordPress markup.

SEO metadata lives in plugin tables. Yoast keeps titles and descriptions in post meta (_yoast_wpseo_title, _yoast_wpseo_metadesc) and exposes the resolved values as yoast_head_json in the REST response. Rank Math and All in One SEO use their own keys. We carry every title, description, canonical and noindex flag across, per page.

Custom fields need a schema. ACF values only appear in the REST API when the field group has "Show in REST API" turned on. We turn it on, read the field definitions, and turn each field group into a typed schema in Payload, with relationships re-linked rather than flattened.

Images come with size variants. WordPress writes resized copies like photo-300x200.jpg next to every upload in /wp-content/uploads/YYYY/MM/, and old posts link to those variants directly. We map every variant back to its original so no image in old content breaks.

Forms are often less wired than you think. Contact Form 7 does not store submissions at all unless a second plugin (Flamingo) is installed. Gravity Forms keeps entries in its own tables. We find out where your leads actually go today, then rewire each form to your real provider (HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Zapier or your own backend) and keep the submission history where it matters.

The Redirect Map Is Where WordPress Migrations Lose Traffic

WordPress serves the same content at more URLs than most teams realise, and every one that has links or rankings needs an explicit 301 target:

• Date-based permalinks like /2024/03/post-name/, if the site ever used them

• Category, tag and author archives, plus their /page/2/ pagination

• Attachment pages, which WordPress creates for every uploaded image

• ?p=123 plain links and old ?page_id= links still sitting in emails and backlinks

• Feeds at /feed/ and per-category feeds

• Trailing slashes, which WordPress adds by default and Next.js does not unless you set trailingSlash: true

We crawl the live site, merge it with your Search Console pages and your sitemap, and build the map from all three. After launch we watch redirect responses and Search Console coverage until the new URLs settle.

Yes, AI Can Reach WordPress. Here Is Where It Stops.

WordPress has an official route for AI agents: the Core AI team's MCP Adapter, built on the Abilities API that arrived in WordPress 6.9. Any vendor telling you AI cannot touch WordPress is out of date.

What an agent reaches that way is the set of abilities a site exposes, mostly content. What it does not get is the site itself. Your layout lives in a theme and a page builder, your features live in plugins that each own their own tables, and changes made in wp-admin go straight to production with no branch, no diff to review and no git revert. The agent cannot run your site, test its change and prove it works before anyone sees it.

In a repository the agent gets the whole thing: layout, content schema, redirects, structured data and tests. It makes a change on a branch, runs the build, reads the failure, fixes it, and you approve before anything goes live. That loop is what you are buying.

What's Included in Every Migration

• Site audit and plugin inventory. Every page, post type, plugin, form, integration and custom function in functions.php is mapped before we quote, which is why the price can be fixed.

• A decision for every plugin. Each one is replaced with native code, replaced with a proper service, rebuilt, or dropped because nothing uses it. You see the list before we start.

• Content extraction through the REST API. Posts, pages, custom post types, ACF fields, taxonomies and media, with shortcodes and blocks converted to real components.

• Payload CMS for your editors. A clean editing screen with your content types, so marketing does not lose the ability to publish.

• Complete 301 redirect map. Archives, pagination, attachment pages, feeds and trailing slashes included.

• SEO and metadata preservation. Titles, descriptions, canonicals, noindex flags and structured data carried across per page.

• Forms and integrations rewired to your real providers.

• QA and Core Web Vitals. Measured before and after, with both numbers reported to you.

• A Git repository you own. Deployable anywhere, editable by your team and your agents, with no plugin licences to renew.

How the Migration Works

Every engagement runs the same sequence, so you always know which phase you are in and what comes next.

What It Costs

We quote fixed prices, scoped before you commit. The band for a 50 to 100 page site is the same $5,000 to $25,000 we quote for any platform.

Page count is a poor predictor. The real drivers are how many plugins do real work, how many custom post types and ACF field groups need a schema, how much content is built from shortcodes or page builder layouts, and how many integrations have to be rebuilt rather than pointed somewhere new. A 40-page site built in Elementor with a booking plugin and a membership plugin can cost more than a clean 200-page blog.

WooCommerce, member areas and multilingual sites (WPML or Polylang) are scoped as separate line items. For WooCommerce in particular, the right answer is sometimes not to move the store at all: keep WooCommerce running headless, or move commerce to Shopify, and rebuild only the marketing site. We will tell you which one fits during the review.

What It Costs to Run Afterwards

"$0 to $20 a month" is only honest if you name the host, so here are both realistic paths.

Static-first on Cloudflare Pages: $0 to $20 a month. Unlimited bandwidth and no commercial-use restriction. The caveat: Pages Functions count against the Workers free tier at 100,000 requests per day, so anything with meaningful server-side work eventually needs a paid plan.

Next.js with Payload and a managed database on Vercel: roughly $20 to $50 a month. Vercel Pro is $20 per user per month and it is the floor, not an upgrade, because Vercel's Hobby tier is non-commercial by Vercel's own terms. Payload is MIT-licensed and free, but it needs a database, and a client-grade managed Postgres is realistically $8 to $30 a month.

Call it under $50 a month either way. What disappears is the rest of the WordPress bill: premium plugin renewals, security plugins, managed WordPress hosting, and the maintenance retainer that exists because the stack needs constant patching. Add up what you pay for those today before you decide. If the total is small and nothing is breaking, the savings alone will not justify a migration.

When You Should Not Hire Us

We would rather lose the enquiry than sell you a migration you do not need.

Stay on WordPress if the site is under 20 pages, one person edits it, it runs a handful of well-maintained plugins, nothing has broken in the last year, and nobody wants AI editing it. WordPress does that job well.

Wait if you are mid-rebrand. Migrating a design you are about to replace means paying for it twice. Finish the redesign, then move the finished thing. Or do both at once: a redesign is the cheapest moment to change platforms, because you are already paying to rebuild the front end.

Keep the store where it is if WooCommerce is the business and the marketing pages are an afterthought. Moving a working store is a bigger risk than the site it sits in.

Think hard if nobody will own deploys. Your editors get a clean CMS, but someone still has to review changes and own the deploy pipeline. If that person does not exist and you are not hiring them, a migration moves the bottleneck rather than removing it.

Why MigrateLab

We sit in the specialist lane: narrower scope than a full-service agency, more depth and accountability than a freelancer marketplace. We do not sell brand strategy or ongoing retainers. The narrow focus is why fixed prices land below full-service agencies for the same work.

The part that matters after launch is the destination. Next.js and Astro are conventional, well documented and deeply represented in the data AI coding tools learned from, so an agent can find its way around your project without a tour. With source control on top, your team gets an agent that can see the whole site, change it, prove the change builds, and be reverted in one command when it gets it wrong. And the repository is yours: any developer or any AI can work on it, with or without us.

Start With a Free Migration Review

The fastest way to find out what your migration costs is to ask. Request a free review and we will audit your WordPress site, list the plugins doing real work, flag the cost drivers, and send back a fixed-price scope and timeline with no obligation. Prefer email? Reach us at [email protected].