What a Laravel Migration Actually Costs, and How Long It Takes

Ask what a Laravel migration costs and you will get the answer nobody likes: it depends. That is not a dodge. Two WordPress sites with the same number of pages can be wildly different underneath, and a price pulled from thin air is how projects go wrong.

This is the honest version. Rough ranges for time and money, what actually drives the quote, what you are paying for, and when the sensible move is to spend nothing at all. It is written for UK business owners who want a straight answer before they book a call, not a sales brochure dressed up as advice.

Why "how much?" has no single number

A migration is not a product on a shelf. You are paying for someone to understand what you have, rebuild what still matters, leave behind what does not, and get you live without wrecking search rankings or day-to-day editing.

The work changes with:

• How big and how tidy the content is
• How many plugins and custom hacks are doing real jobs
• Whether you need more than pages: memberships, bookings, shops, portals
• What has to keep talking to other systems
• How careful the SEO cutover has to be

A fifty-page marketing site with a contact form is one job. A fifty-page marketing site that also runs members, paid renewals and a half-custom booking plugin is another. Same page count. Different project.

So when someone asks for a price in the first email, the useful reply is not a guess. It is: send us a look at the site, or hop on a short call, and we will give you a fixed number. Anything else is theatre.

Rough ranges, in plain terms

We quote fixed prices after a proper look, so treat these as orientation rather than a menu. They are the bands UK small and mid-sized projects usually fall into.

A straightforward brochure or marketing site. Content is mostly pages and posts, editors need a clean admin, no heavy custom features. Often four to eight weeks, and commonly a mid four-figure build. This is the cleanest kind of move: content across, URLs mapped, redirects in place, Statamic or a simple admin for the team.

A site with real application features. Bookings, memberships, directories, customer logins, non-trivial forms, or a shop that has outgrown WooCommerce. Timeline stretches, often two to four months, and the price moves into five figures depending on how much has to be rebuilt rather than replaced with something simpler. You are not just moving pages; you are replacing working machinery.

A large or tangled estate. Thousands of URLs, years of plugin archaeology, multiple integrations, or an old bespoke PHP app rather than a normal CMS. Scoped individually. The calendar is measured in months, and so is the budget. Rushing these is how rankings and patience both get damaged.

Hosting and ongoing care sit beside the build, not inside it. A lean Laravel site is often cheaper to run year to year than a plugin-heavy WordPress install; that is a separate conversation we cover in the hidden costs of WordPress.

What you are actually paying for

People hear "migration" and picture copying content into a new box. That is maybe a fifth of the job. The rest is the unglamorous work that decides whether the new site feels finished or half-moved.

Understanding what you have. An audit of content, plugins, custom code, forms, users and integrations. Without this, everyone discovers surprises in week six.

Rebuilding what still earns its keep. Not every feature deserves a new home. Some get rebuilt properly. Some get replaced with a simpler approach. Some get dropped because nobody has used them in two years. Judgement here saves money; copying everything blindly wastes it.

A proper editing screen. Your team still needs to update the site. That usually means Statamic or Filament, shaped around how they work, not a blank framework and a promise.

SEO protection. URL maps, redirects, metadata, sitemaps, a calm cutover. Done properly, rankings hold. Done as an afterthought, they do not. We walk through that in how to migrate without losing SEO.

Testing and handover. Clicking every important path, checking forms and payments if you have them, training editors, leaving notes so a new starter is not stranded in six months.

Keeping the old site live. Parallel build, then switch. No "sorry we are down for a fortnight" banner.

That is the job. The CMS brand on the old site matters less than how much of the above is tangled.

What pushes a quote up

A few things move the needle more than page count.

Custom features that actually matter. If a plugin is doing something awkward but important, membership rules, quoting, stock, that logic has to be understood and rebuilt. Replacing a contact form does not.

Messy content. Duplicate pages, ancient drafts, URLs that were never tidy, five ways of saying the same service. Someone has to sort that, either you before we start or us as part of the project. Tidying first is cheaper.

Integrations. CRM, accounts, payment providers, mailing tools, property feeds. Each one is a small project inside the project.

Permissions and users. A site with one editor is simple. A site with twenty staff in different roles, member logins and gated content is not.

Design ambition. Re-skinning to a clean new design is normal. Asking for a full brand rethink mid-migration is a second project wearing the first project's clothes.

None of these are reasons to avoid migrating. They are reasons a honest quote takes a look at the real site.

What brings a quote down

You have more control than it feels.

• Decide what you can live without. Old landing pages nobody visits do not need a royal escort.
• Clean content before or during the project. Less rubbish across means less rubbish to rebuild.
• Prefer a phased move: public site and editing first, heavier features in a second stage once the foundation is live.
• Bring examples of admin screens your team likes, so we are not inventing preferences from scratch.
• Stay available for decisions. Waiting a week for a yes on redirects costs calendar time even when it does not change the day rate.

Fixed pricing only works when the scope is honest. If the scope changes because the business discovers a new must-have mid-build, the price changes with it. That is fair on both sides.

Timeline: what the weeks usually look like

A typical small-site migration is less mysterious than it sounds.

Week 1 or so. Discovery, access, audit, agreement on what comes across and what does not. Fixed price and dates locked.

The middle stretch. Build the Laravel foundations, set up the editor, migrate content in batches, wire forms and any agreed features, prepare redirects.

Near the end. Testing, editor walkthrough, SEO checks, staging review with you.

Cutover. Switch DNS or hosting when you are happy. Old site retired once the new one is confirmed stable. Watch Search Console for a bit afterwards.

Larger projects stretch each of those stages rather than inventing new ones. The old site stays public the whole time. Your team is not asked to "manage without a website" while we work.

For platform-specific notes, the individual guides are useful: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, MODX, and legacy PHP. The cost logic above is the same shape for all of them; only the archaeology changes.

Migration cost versus the cost of staying

The build is the visible invoice. Staying put has invoices too, just smaller and easier to ignore: plugin renewals, emergency fixes, slow pages, security scares, staff time spent fighting the admin.

A Laravel move front-loads cost. Many businesses find the totals cross over within a few years, especially once the site has grown past "simple brochure". That crossover is not automatic. If your WordPress site is calm, cheap and doing its job, the maths may say stay. We will say that if it is true. The signs you have outgrown your CMS piece is a useful sense-check before you spend anything.

When you should not spend this money

Do not migrate because Laravel is fashionable. Do not migrate because a developer enjoyed a conference talk. Do not migrate a site you are about to close or replace for unrelated business reasons.

Wait if:

• The site is simple, stable and cheap to run
• You do not yet know what the business needs from the website next year
• The pain is really a hosting or plugin problem that a smaller fix would solve
• Nobody internal has time to answer questions during a project

Migrate when the platform is costing you money, sleep or opportunities on a repeating basis, and you want a foundation you control. The point of a fixed-price migration is not to buy software for its own sake. It is to stop paying tax on a system you have outgrown.

Get a number that means something

If you want a real figure rather than a blog range, that is what the free consultation is for. Send the site, tell us what hurts, and we will come back with a fixed price and timeline, or with an honest "not yet". No open-ended billing, and we reply within 24 hours.

Book a free consultation, or read how the phased process works on our CMS migration page. AugmentBLU is based in Edinburgh and works with businesses across Scotland and the UK. Bring the awkward questions; they are usually the useful ones.