Every migration conversation eventually reaches the same fork: do it ourselves, or pay someone? The DIY route looks free and the professional route looks expensive, and both appearances are misleading. DIY costs your hours plus the risk you carry; professional migration costs money plus the vetting you have to do. The right answer depends on measurable properties of your site — not on courage. Here's the honest comparison.

What the Market Actually Charges

Current pricing surveys put website migration costs in fairly consistent bands:

• $300–1,500 — simple like-for-like moves (hosting-level, small content sites)
• $1,500–5,000 — small-to-mid CMS migrations: content restructuring, redirect mapping, SEO preservation
• $5,000–30,000+ — large sites, e-commerce, custom functionality, or a redesign bundled into the move

The spread within each band is mostly three variables: page count, page builder entanglement (extraction is where the labor lives), and how much custom functionality — forms, memberships, commerce — has to find a new home.

What DIY Really Costs

For a typical 50–200 page business site, a competent DIY migration — export, import, redirect map, SEO verification, testing — runs 30–80 hours for someone doing it the first time. Price those hours at what your time earns elsewhere and the 'free' option lands somewhere in the $1,500–6,000 range before anything goes wrong. The honest hidden costs:

• First-timer tax: you'll do several steps twice. Tutorials compress judgment calls that take real time — content triage, mapping decisions, edge-case URLs.
• The risk is asymmetric: the expensive failure isn't breaking the site (visible, fixable) but silently losing rankings — a missed redirect pattern or shipped noindex that costs 20–60% of organic traffic and months of recovery.
• Opportunity cost: the weeks you spend migrating are weeks not spent on the business.

When DIY Is Genuinely the Right Call

• Under ~50 pages of mostly standard posts and pages — no page builder archaeology, no commerce
• Organic search isn't your main acquisition channel, so the downside is capped
• Someone technical on the team owns it end-to-end and will follow the checklist rather than improvising
• You can keep the old site running in parallel until everything verifies — no forced cutover date

In this bracket, DIY is not just cheaper — it's a good way to learn your new platform deeply. Modern CMS importers handle standard WordPress exports well (the WordPress-to-EmDash guide walks the whole path), and the redirect map for a small stable-slug site can be a dozen rules.

When Professional Is Cheaper (Yes, Cheaper)

• Organic traffic pays your bills. If search brings meaningful revenue, compare the fee against one bad quarter of rankings — the fee wins.
• Page builder entanglement. Hundreds of Elementor/Divi pages mean extraction and rebuild work where experience shows: a professional has done the untangling twenty times.
• Complex URL history. Years of permalink changes, plugins, and old redirects stack into an inventory problem where misses are invisible until traffic drops.
• E-commerce and memberships. Orders, accounts, and payment flows raise the stakes from 'traffic dip' to 'revenue outage'.
• No time, hard deadline. A migration squeezed into evenings stretches over months; a professional runs it in weeks with a content freeze measured in days.

Vetting a Migration Provider — Five Questions

• "Walk me through your redirect mapping process." (You want an inventory-driven, one-to-one answer — not 'we redirect to the new homepage.')
• "How do you carry over SEO metadata?" (They should mention exporting plugin data from the database, as our export guide describes.)
• "What does your post-launch monitoring cover, and for how long?" (Search Console watching for at least two weeks.)
• "What do you benchmark before starting?" (Rankings, traffic, top pages — no baseline, no accountability.)
• "What's explicitly out of scope?" (An honest provider names things. 'Everything included' at a low price means the redirect map is nobody's job.)

The Bottom Line

Price DIY at your real hourly value plus a risk premium scaled to how much organic traffic matters; price professional migration at the quote plus vetting time. For small content sites the math usually favors DIY; the moment builders, commerce, or serious search revenue enter the picture, it flips. Whichever path you choose, the process is the same one in the WordPress migration checklist — the only question is whose hands are on it. And if you're still upstream of this decision entirely, the real cost of running WordPress is the number to compare both options against: staying isn't free either.