September 09, 2026
"A migration? Yes, that is quite a job, you know." Often that is true. But at least as often it is just a nice way of selling. Because the more complicated it sounds, the thicker the quote is allowed to be.
So, to be honest: how heavy a migration is depends almost entirely on what is on your site now. And for a lot of sites that is really not so bad.
There are roughly three kinds of sites
Pages, news, some forms, maybe a search function. No connections to other systems, no exotic custom work. This is the largest group, and this is also really the easiest group. The content has to come across neatly, the design rebuilt, and done.
A connection to a CRM or a newsletter system, a vacancies module, a few building blocks of your own. Perfectly doable, but those pieces ask for attention and time.
Webshop, portal, logging in, connections that touch the business process. Then it is a real project. We are not going to be coy about that either — it costs what it costs.
The annoying thing is that many agencies treat every site as that last one. Even when you are simply in the first category.
This is perhaps the most important sentence of this whole piece: a migration does not have to mean that something changes.
We can move your site over one to one. The same functionality, the same way of working in the CMS, the same design. Your editors log in on Monday and recognise everything — only it now runs on a version that will still get updates in the years ahead. It does not have to be more than that.
That is more often the best choice than you would think. If it works, it works. And it keeps the job small and the price predictable.
But we do not keep our mouths shut. While we go through everything, we automatically see what can be better or different — in the CMS, in the structure of your HTML, in the design, in your findability, in the accessibility. We write that down and you get it from us. With advice alongside it about what we would do right away (because that costs almost nothing extra if we are in there anyway), what you had better save for later, and what you can simply leave as it is.
What you do with it, you decide yourself. We do not attach a quote to it that you did not ask for.
We use AI at every step. Not because it sounds nice in a quote, but because it is exactly the work in which a human becomes slow and sloppy and a machine does not.
1. First measure where you stand.
Before anything moves at all, we record where you stand now: how your site scores in Google, whether you come back in the answers of AI assistants, and how accessibility stands. In black and white, at the start. Sounds obvious, but almost nobody does it — and without that baseline measurement nobody can afterwards prove whether the migration cost you something or actually delivered something.
2. Analyse.
We run through the whole site: which page types there are, which are really used, which packages are in it, where the custom work sits, and what dead wood has been left standing over the years. On almost every site a surprise comes out of that — often that a substantial part of what is there has not been touched by anyone for years. So you do not have to move that along either. That saves immediately.
3. Migrate.
Content and structure come across, and where custom work no longer works on the new version we build it again. The repetitive work — converting hundreds of pages, mapping fields, bringing media along — we do not have done by hand.
4. Validate.
After the migration we compare the old and the new site page by page: is all the content there, do the links work, are the images there, do the forms work, have the old URLs been redirected neatly? In the past you did that with a sample and a good feeling. Now it goes across the whole site.
5. And then measure again.
The same scan as in step 1, so that you can see what has changed — in Google, in AI answers and in accessibility. And after that we keep an eye on it for a while longer, because the real blows in a migration do not fall on day one but in week four, when search engines have run through your site again.
That is also where the real gain is for you. Not that it goes faster (although it does), but that the errors are found before go-live instead of by a visitor in week three.
A site that has existed for ten years has built up something valuable: positions in Google, links from other sites, addresses that people know and that have been shared everywhere. That is years of work that you do not buy back.
And that is exactly what perishes in a sloppy migration. Old addresses that no longer point anywhere, page titles that disappear, structure that changes without anyone noticing. You only notice it when the traffic drops, and then the link to the cause is already lost.
That is why we attach those measurements at the start and at the end. We make sure that every old address redirects neatly to the right new page — not all of them to the homepage, because then you might as well not do it. And we immediately take along the things that were never right on the old version: missing page titles, images without a description, headings in the wrong order.
A migration is in fact the only moment at which you can catch up on that backlog without it being extra work. You are in there anyway.
Accessibility simply belongs with that, as far as we are concerned. For municipalities, education and healthcare it is not optional, but also without an obligation: a site that a screen reader gets through smoothly is a better site for everyone. And search engines and AI assistants read your page in almost the same way as a screen reader. Neatly structured headings and descriptions on images therefore help twice.
To be honest: When there are connections that touch the business process and that have to be built again.
When there are packages in it that no longer exist or are no longer maintained. Then something else has to come.
When the site grows along with a redesign of the visual design. That is then no longer a migration but a new site — fine, but then call it that too.
When nobody knows anymore how it fits together. That costs investigation, and that is real work.
If you are not in that situation? Then it is simply a manageable job with a manageable price.
We have done 12 of them by now, from Umbraco 7 and 8 and from other systems such as Kentico and Wordpress. It costs from 1000 for simple to 30,000 for a complex site/application/
Send us the link to your site. We run our analysis over it and say within a day which category you are in and roughly what it will be. No quote, no sales pitch — just an answer.
And if it turns out that you can still perfectly go on for a year on your current version, then we say that too.
