I've taken six sites off WordPress and I sell the work, so weigh what follows with that in mind. I'll start with the reasons not to do it.
A well-maintained WordPress site competes fine in Google and in AI answers. NodeTech Consulting, which also sells migrations, makes the same point and adds that a caching plugin and a CDN solve most WordPress speed problems. If your problem is a slow theme or a bloated page builder, fixing that costs a fraction of a migration.
1. When to stay on WordPress
Stay if your site is a brochure or blog on decent hosting and your editors work well in the WordPress admin.
A slow WordPress site is often a fixable one. UltraRedesign describes the usual pattern: a page builder goes in, then an SEO plugin, a forms plugin, a caching plugin to compensate for the first three, and a security plugin to watch all of it, until the homepage ships three to five megabytes of CSS and JavaScript before a visitor sees anything. You can strip most of that out without leaving WordPress.
2. When a migration is worth it
NodeTech lists four triggers:
- Your site has become an application, with accounts, dashboards, quoting or booking flows fighting plugin limits
- You've hit a performance ceiling you can't fix inside the theme and plugin stack
- You need real multilingual routing across several languages
- Security updates across a large plugin surface have become a weekly chore
The multilingual one is the case I work on most, since every site I build runs in French, English and German.
3. What it costs
Published 2026 prices run from $490 for SEOParity's standalone migration audit on a small WordPress site to $50,000 and more for a large rebuild. DevCritters puts full migrations at $10,000 to $50,000, and headless WordPress builds at $15,000 to $30,000.
Your template count drives the price. SEOParity gives the example: a site with 500 blog posts on eight page types has eight templates to rebuild, while a 50-page site with 22 custom Elementor layouts has 22. Count your distinct layouts before you ask for quotes, since the quotes scale with that number.
You can keep WordPress for your editors. In a headless setup, WordPress stays as the admin your team knows and Next.js serves the public site. DevCritters recommends it when the team is attached to the WordPress editor, and a full move to another CMS when WordPress itself is the bottleneck.
4. What breaks, and the redirect map
WordPress gives you SEO features through plugins. Yoast generates your titles, meta descriptions, canonicals and sitemap. Next.js ships none of that. Your developer has to rebuild each piece, and whatever they skip stops working the day you launch.
These have to survive the move:
- Page titles, meta descriptions and canonical tags on every template
- The XML sitemap, regenerated and resubmitted
- Structured data, rendered on the server so search engines and AI assistants can read it
- Internal links, updated so none point at a redirect
- Meta robots tags, carried over so blocked pages stay blocked and the rest stay indexable
Digital Applied flags structured data as a launch requirement in 2026, because AI assistants lean on it to decide which sites to cite. Lose it in the move and you can lose your AI visibility along with your rankings.
Then the redirect map. Each old URL needs a permanent redirect to its closest new equivalent, in one hop. Redirecting everything to the homepage is the most common way sites throw away the ranking signals their pages built up, according to Digital Prahlad's 2026 migration checklist.
Keep a URL identical on the new site wherever you can. An unchanged URL needs no redirect at all.
5. How long the traffic dip lasts
That depends on whether you change domain, and most of the frightening numbers you'll read come from domain changes. A study of 892 domain migrations, reported by Digital Applied, found the average site took about 523 days to recover its traffic, and 17% never did.
Moving from WordPress to Next.js on the same domain is a lower-risk project. Digital Prahlad rates a domain change as riskier than a same-domain rebuild.
On the same domain, expect a short dip. Google's guidance, as cited by SEO.Domains, says a small to medium site takes about two to four weeks for the bulk of its pages to move. A dip in the first month is normal even on a clean migration. Search Engine Journal puts a normal dip at 10 to 30% and treats anything past 50% as a sign something broke. A drop that is still getting worse by week six to eight points to a technical error, such as a missing redirect or a stray noindex tag.
6. Migrate, or rebuild from scratch
Leaving WordPress can mean two different projects.
A migration keeps your design, content and URLs and swaps the platform underneath. It's the lower-risk route. SEO.Domains recommends changing one thing at a time during a move so Google has a single variable to reprocess, and a migration follows that rule: move to Next.js with everything else intact, confirm traffic has held, then redesign.
A rebuild from scratch starts over, with a new design and new content and nothing carried from WordPress. It makes sense when the old site isn't worth preserving. You change more at once, so the redirect map and the SEO rebuild need extra care, and you should expect more movement in the first weeks.
7. My approach and price
I've rebuilt six WordPress sites in Next.js from scratch, with nothing carried over: iPixelP, Orchestra Media, Bridge Exhibitions, FEIMA Travel, Tanit Studio and Marse Photo. iPixelP's mobile Lighthouse score went from 42 to 96, and desktop from 74 to 96. Tanit Studio reached 100. The projects are in my case studies.
A migration or rebuild with me starts at 1,200 € for a small site. The final number depends on the number of templates and how much content you're moving or rewriting. I build in React and Next.js, and every project includes the full redirect map and the SEO checks described above.
If you're not sure a migration is worth it, an SEO and GEO audit shows whether your site's problems are fixable on WordPress. For the cost of a full redesign, see website redesign cost in 2026. My pricing is public: see pricing.
Sources
Figures gathered on 21 September 2026 from published sources: SEOParity, DevCritters, NodeTech Consulting, UltraRedesign, Digital Prahlad, Digital Applied, SEO.Domains and Search Engine Journal. The 523-day and 17% figures describe domain migrations only. Market prices are in US dollars as published.
Thinking about leaving WordPress? Send me your site and I'll tell you whether it needs a migration or a few fixes where it is. Get in touch, I reply within 24 hours. Full pricing: see pricing.
