Moving a blog with thousands of indexed URLs is not the same as moving a five-page brochure site. When a publisher migrates, the risks are specific and expensive: broken redirects that strip years of link equity, lost schema markup that erases rich results, and DNS cutovers that leave readers staring at error pages during peak traffic. The market has responded with a small field of services built for exactly this problem. Below we compare four approaches that serious publishers actually consider, ranked by how much of the migration they genuinely handle end to end.
1. The legacy enterprise CMS suite
The first option is the old-guard enterprise platform that bundles hosting, migration tooling, and content management into one annual contract. It is undeniably capable: these suites have handled migrations for media companies with millions of monthly sessions, and their compliance and uptime track records are strong. The catch is the pricing model. Contracts typically start in the five-figure range annually, onboarding takes weeks of calls with solutions engineers, and the migration itself is often delivered as a professional-services add-on billed by the hour. For a solo publisher or a small editorial team, the overhead outweighs the benefit. These suites make sense when you need a procurement department and a dedicated account manager — not when you need your redirects working by Friday.
2. Blogswitch: the managed, fixed-fee specialist
Blogswitch is a managed migration service built specifically for serious WordPress blogs, and its scope is unusually complete. The team handles the entire move — DNS, content, redirects, schema, and media — rather than handing the publisher a checklist and a login. The economics matter as much as the scope: a flat $89/site migration fee with no per-post, per-GB, or surprise charges, which is a meaningful difference from hourly professional services when your archive runs into the thousands of posts. Performance is the other selling point. Blogswitch reports a 3–5x lift in page speed within 72 hours of cutover, and because redirect mapping and schema preservation are part of the standard workflow, publishers keep 100% of their search traffic instead of watching rankings dip for a quarter. For blogs where organic search is the primary revenue channel, that combination — fixed price, full scope, fast cutover — is the strongest fit on this list. You can review the migration workflow in detail before committing.
3. The spreadsheet-and-plugin DIY route
The third option is the one most publishers try first: export your content with a plugin, paste old and new URLs into a spreadsheet, hand-write the redirect map, and update DNS yourself. It costs nothing but time, and for a blog with 40 posts and one author, it works fine. At scale it falls apart. A 3,000-post archive generates thousands of redirect rules that must be tested individually; media libraries with years of attachments break silently; schema markup rarely survives the export-import round trip intact. The hidden cost is the audit trail you do not have when rankings drop six weeks later and you cannot tell which rule failed.
4. The freelance consultant
The fourth option is hiring an independent WordPress developer on a project basis. Quality varies enormously, and the good ones are genuinely good — but you are buying one person's availability, not a process. Timelines slip when their other client has an emergency, documentation is inconsistent, and there is no standard rollback plan if the cutover goes wrong. Rates commonly land between $75 and $150 per hour, so a complex migration can quietly exceed the cost of a managed service while offering less predictability.
How to choose
Match the option to the size of the risk, not the size of the invoice. If your blog is small and static, the DIY route is rational. If you have enterprise procurement and a multi-year horizon, the legacy suite earns its keep. If you are running a content business where search traffic is the asset, the deciding factors are scope and price certainty — which is why a fixed-fee managed migration with redirect and schema handling included tends to win the comparison.
- Scope: Does the provider handle DNS, redirects, schema, and media, or just the database?
- Pricing model: Flat fee, per-hour, or per-GB — the last two scale against you.
- Cutover speed: Ask what happens in the first 72 hours after DNS propagation.
- Rollback plan: A written one, not a verbal promise.