Ten menu items say little about the cost of a move. A store with a thousand products has at least a thousand product pages, plus categories, filters, pagination and old campaign pages, and every URL with visits or inbound links has to lead straight to its counterpart. Those URLs and the data that must arrive intact set the price.
What sets the price of a migration
| Item | Why it weighs in the quote |
|---|---|
| URLs with traffic and links | each gets a 301 straight to its counterpart, filter and old campaign URLs included |
| Store data | products with variants, customers and orders move by script, with record counts compared before and after |
| Customer passwords | WordPress 6.8 and later store bcrypt hashes, but accounts not signed in since the update still hold phpass ones; the new system must read both, or customers set new passwords |
| A test before switch-over | redirects, forms and payments are checked on a copy with real data |
| A new domain | the move is reported in Search Console and the old domain stays registered |
What you pay for after switch-over day
Google says a medium-sized site can wait a few weeks or more before results show its new URLs, and advises keeping redirects as long as possible, generally at least a year. After a domain change it also recommends paying for the old domain for at least a year, so nobody buys it for malicious purposes. Meanwhile we watch 404 errors and indexing in Search Console, and a copy of the old site stays ready for a quick rollback until traffic settles.
The steps are in our post on migrating without losing rankings, and scope and quoting are on our website and store migration page.
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