What Does It Actually Cost to Migrate from WordPress to Statamic?
Pricing is one of those topics that a lot of agencies dance around. You fill out a contact form, wait a few days, get on a call, and eventually — maybe — someone tells you a number. By that point you've invested real time just trying to answer what feels like a basic question.
I'd rather just be upfront about it.
Migration projects with Cascadia Digital start at $15,000. That's not a teaser rate or a best-case scenario — it's where a straightforward migration begins. More complex sites go higher, and I'll explain why in a moment.
But before I get into the numbers, it helps to understand what you're actually paying for, because migrating a website sounds simple until you pull back the curtain on everything it involves.
What's Actually Included in a Migration
A CMS migration isn't just moving files from one place to another. At its core, it involves four distinct bodies of work:
Content migration. Every post, page, custom post type, image, and piece of metadata needs to move from WordPress to Statamic accurately. Depending on how your content is structured — and how consistently it was managed over the years — this can range from relatively clean to genuinely complicated.
URL preservation and redirects. As I've written about elsewhere, this is non-negotiable for protecting your SEO. Every URL that changes needs a 301 redirect pointing to its new home. On a large site, this mapping exercise alone is a significant piece of work.
Design and front-end development. The new site needs to look and function like a website, not just a content dump. Whether we're matching your existing design or refining it, the front-end build is usually where a significant portion of the project time goes.
Statamic configuration. One of the things that makes Statamic genuinely better for content teams is that the control panel is configured specifically for how your team works. That doesn't happen automatically — it's designed and built as part of the project.
On top of those four pillars, every migration includes a team training session and a post-launch support period, because handing you the keys to something you've never used before and walking away isn't how I operate.
What Makes a Migration More Expensive
The starting price reflects a relatively straightforward site. Here's what pushes a project higher:
Volume of content. A site with 2,000 posts and a decade of media assets is simply more work than a site with 50 pages. Content migration doesn't scale linearly — there's a lot of auditing and decision-making involved — but volume does affect the timeline and therefore the cost.
Custom post types and complex content models. If your WordPress site has been heavily customized with Advanced Custom Fields, custom taxonomies, or a page builder like Elementor or Divi, there's extra work involved in mapping that content model into Statamic's architecture cleanly. This alone can take up a significant chunk of the cost of a migration.
Third-party integrations. Forms, CRMs, marketing automation, e-commerce, membership systems — each integration needs to be audited and either rebuilt, replaced with a Statamic equivalent, or handled through an API connection. These add scope, complexity, and cost.
Design work. If the migration is also an opportunity to refresh or redesign the site — which it often is — that's a separate conversation from a straight migration. Design work is scoped on its own merits.
Multi-site setups. WordPress multisite installations introduce their own layer of complexity. These projects fall into a custom-quote category.
The Hidden Cost of Not Migrating
This is the part of the conversation that often gets left out.
WordPress has a cost too — it's just distributed across time in a way that makes it easy to underestimate. Plugin licensing, developer time spent on updates and conflicts, security incidents, performance optimization work that never quite gets your site where you want it — these aren't one-time costs. They recur, year after year.
I've had clients come to me after spending thousands of dollars trying to patch a WordPress site into acceptable shape, only to find that a migration would have been cheaper over a three-year horizon. The migration feels like a big number on day one. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts of maintaining WordPress feels smaller in the moment, until you add it up.
I'm not saying this to scare anyone away from their existing setup. Some sites are well-maintained on WordPress and running fine. But if you're already spending meaningful time and money managing WordPress problems, it's worth doing that math honestly before deciding the migration is too expensive.
What Happens After Launch
A few ongoing costs worth knowing about:
Hosting. Statamic sites typically cost less to host than WordPress, because the flat-file architecture means you don't need a database server. If you'd like us to manage hosting, plans start at $99/month. If you prefer to self-host, we can help you get set up on your own infrastructure.
Ongoing support. Some clients want a developer on retainer for new features and maintenance. That starts at $2k/month. Others prefer to manage things themselves after the initial training; Statamic is genuinely approachable for teams who want that independence, but a knowledgeable developer on your team is a must-have.
Statamic licensing. Statamic has a free tier for small sites, and paid licenses for sites that need the full feature set. It's a one-time purchase per site, not an ongoing subscription, which is one of the things that makes the total cost of ownership quite reasonable over time. If you opt for hosting or support with me, this cost will be included as part of the price.
If you're trying to figure out whether a migration makes financial sense for your organization, the best place to start is an honest conversation about your current site. I offer a free consultation where we look at what you have, what a migration would actually involve, and what it would cost — no obligation, no pressure.
Reach out here and we'll find some time.