Your WordPress site is costing more than you think.

How much does it cost to migrate a WordPress site?

A WordPress to Next.js or Astro migration in 2026 costs £8,000 to £45,000 depending on page count, plugin reimplementation, and whether WooCommerce, WPML, or membership flows are involved. The calculator above returns your specific band: median, 5-week sprint low end, and 12-week full rebuild high end. Year-1 hosting on the new stack lands at £540 to £2,400.

What drives the 5-year cost of WordPress?

• Hosting -- managed WordPress hosts charge $20 to $50/month for traffic that Vercel serves at the free tier or $20/month flat.
• Plugin licences -- 18 plugins on a typical site means $300 to $800/year in renewals, with 8% annual inflation built in.
• Dev hours -- security patching, plugin compatibility testing, and theme updates add up to 4-12 hours/month at $75/hour blended.
• Plugin overhead -- each active plugin costs about 2 dev hours/year just keeping the lights on.
• Tech debt tax -- sites older than 5 years carry an additional $1,200/year in unplanned breakage, dependency churn, and PHP version migrations.

How we calculated this -- for the engineer your CMO is going to forward this to.

Every constant in this calculator is documented and dated. The hosting tier penalties come from public host rate cards. CVE counts come from a Patchstack public vulnerability database snapshot dated May 2026, matched against the top 50 plugins by install share. Migration cost bands match the range we quote in real discovery calls. Plugin licence inflation is set at 8% per year (industry trailing 5-year average). The 60-month chart compounds these monthly with a one-time migration spike for the Modern Jamstack series. Every constant is rendered live on the methodology page.

Is your WordPress site invisible to AI search?

There's a cost this calculator can't put a number on: the leads you never see because AI search skipped you. AI Overviews now appear on roughly 47% of Google queries, and ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity all cite sources when they answer. Page-builder WordPress sites are bad candidates -- bloated nested-div HTML, content rendered late, no FAQ schema, and no llms.txt. AI engines can parse it, but they prefer a cleaner source, so they cite your competitor instead. A static-first rebuild ships semantic HTML that AI engines read and cite cleanly. To score your site on speed, AI-readiness, security, and SEO in one pass, run the Modernization Audit or read the full website modernization guide.

Why compare against Modern Jamstack?

Modern Jamstack is the comparison we can quote precisely -- it's the stack we ship: Next.js or Astro on Vercel, Supabase for data and auth, Stripe for payments, Resend for email. Webflow and Shopify are valid alternatives at different price points (and we'll add them in a later version of this calculator). The numbers here are what a senior product team should expect from any modern static-first React or Astro stack on a Tier-1 CDN.

What's not in this calculator yet

The manual calculator and the URL auto-scan are live, and the methodology page renders every constant live from formulas.ts. Still to come: the live Patchstack feed with weekly CVE refresh, and a one-click PDF download -- the printable report covers that for now. The migration paths sidebar is populated from our shipped work in /migrate/.