A WordPress to React migration in the US costs roughly 8,000 to 30,000 dollars with a freelancer, 25,000 to 120,000 with an agency, and 60,000 upward once genuine application behaviour is involved. The spread is not padding, and it is rarely about design quality. It is about whether the crawl, the URL policy, the redirect map, content parity checks and launch verification are inside the price. WPBuildAI itemises the migration separately from the build for exactly that reason: it is the only way to compare two quotes that look like they describe the same project, and it is the line where a 12,000 dollar proposal and a 45,000 dollar proposal actually differ. Here is what each band buys.
What are the three price bands?
They correspond to who is doing the work and how much of the site has history worth protecting.
| Band | Typical US price | What it usually includes | What it usually omits | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freelance | 8,000 to 30,000 | Design, build, basic content move | Full crawl, tested redirect map, parity checks | Fine for small sites with little history |
| Agency, standard | 25,000 to 120,000 | Design system, build, project management | Varies enormously, so read the line items | The band where scope must be checked hardest |
| Application rebuild | 60,000 upward | Everything above, plus real software | Nothing, if scoped honestly | Correct when memberships or commerce are involved |
| Build only, any supplier | 6,000 to 20,000 | Pages that look right | Everything protecting your traffic | Right only when there is nothing to preserve |
The last row is the one that gets bought by mistake. It is a legitimate product, and on a site with years of URLs it is the expensive kind of cheap, because the archive stops resolving and nobody notices until week five.
Where does the money actually go?
Not into design, which is what most people assume when they see a large number.
On a forty page site with six years of history, the front end build is typically a quarter to a third of the hours. Components have to be written rather than assembled from a template, and a design system that a builder would give you free is now something a developer authors. That is real work and it is not most of the invoice.
The rest is proportional to how much site you have rather than to how fast anyone codes. The crawl and exports. The URL policy: which of the six hundred addresses your site serves stay identical and which change. The redirect map, one row at a time, with judgment on each. Page by page parity checks against the captured originals. Launch verification across every mapped URL.
Google treats a move with URL changes as a specific process requiring old addresses to resolve, and that process costs the same hours whatever framework produces the new pages.
What should be itemised in a quote?
Six lines, and the presence or absence of the middle four is the whole comparison.
| Line item | Share of a fair quote | Missing means |
|---|---|---|
| Content and URL inventory | 10 to 15 percent | The build starts from remembered pages |
| URL policy, written | 2 to 5 percent | Structure decided by component design |
| Redirect map plus testing | 15 to 25 percent | Old addresses 404 on launch day |
| Front end build | 25 to 35 percent | Nothing, this is always present |
| Content parity checks | About 10 percent | Pages arrive thinner than the originals |
| Launch verification and a defect window | About 10 percent | Nobody knows whether the map worked |
Read a quote by looking for lines two, three, five and six. A proposal that names them with hours against each is describing a migration. A proposal where redirects appear as a reassuring phrase inside a paragraph is describing a build, whatever the total.
The same structure applies at any price point, which is why a 15,000 dollar quote with all six lines can be better value than a 40,000 dollar quote with two.
Why is React more expensive than the alternatives?
Three reasons, and all three persist after launch.
The build is longer. React components are authored rather than assembled, so a forty page site takes two to four weeks of front end work where a static site generator with a template takes one.
Rendering has to be decided and implemented. Server rendering or prerendering is required for pages you want found, since Google renders JavaScript in a second pass with a delay and several AI retrieval systems do far less of it. The options are well documented and each carries setup cost.
And you own an application afterwards. Dependencies update, builds break, and somebody maintains that. Expect 30 to 60 percent more than an equivalent static build up front, plus a genuine ongoing obligation.
For a brochure or service site, that premium buys very little, which is the honest framing in WordPress to React migration.
What drives your number up or down?
Five factors, roughly in order of how much they move the total.
Archive size first. A 300 page site with eight years of posts generates thousands of addresses once paginated archives, tag pages and attachment URLs are counted, and every one needs a decision. This is the single largest variable and it is knowable before you ask for a quote.
Application behaviour second. Memberships, subscription billing, bookings with availability, or complex commerce pricing are software, and they move the project into the third band by themselves.
Design origin third. Adapting your existing design costs a fraction of creating a new one, and most businesses are better served adapting.
Content decisions fourth. A migration where somebody also wants the service pages rewritten is two projects sharing a deadline, and the writing is always the slower one.
Access and readiness fifth. Projects stall for days waiting on a registrar login or a hosting password, and stalled days get billed.
How do you check a quote is realistic?
Four questions, and the specificity of the answers matters more than the answers.
Ask how many URLs your site currently serves. A supplier who has run a crawl gives a number. One who has not gives your page count, which is usually a fifth of the real figure, and that gap is the part of the project they have not priced.
Ask who writes and tests the redirect map, and how. The answer should describe a file with one row per old address and an automated run on launch day.
Ask how content parity is checked. The answer should describe comparing new pages against captured originals rather than a review meeting.
Ask what happens in weeks two to six after launch. Coverage monitoring and a defect window should be included, because that is when the evidence arrives. The fuller version of what a service owes you is in WordPress to Lovable migration service.
What does it cost to run afterwards?
Lower than WordPress and not zero, and the second half of that sentence is where React differs from a static rebuild.
Hosting for a server rendered React site runs 20 to 200 dollars a month depending on traffic and whether you need a running server or can prerender to files. A fully prerendered site sits at the bottom of that range and behaves like static hosting.
Dependency maintenance is the cost that has no WordPress equivalent in this form. A React project carries packages that release updates, some of them security relevant, and somebody applies them. Budget four to twelve hours a year for a straightforward site, more if the dependency list is long. Ignoring it is the same mistake as ignoring WordPress updates, with the same shape and a slower fuse.
Against that, everything WordPress was charging for disappears: no plugin licences, no theme renewals, no maintenance retainer, and no break fix months when an update changes a layout.
Net, a React site typically runs 500 to 2,500 dollars a year against 1,000 to 4,500 for a maintained WordPress site of similar size. The saving is real and it is smaller than the static equivalent, which is worth knowing before the premium is justified on running costs.
How do you compare two quotes fairly?
Normalise them before reading the totals, because suppliers scope differently and the headline numbers are rarely measuring the same thing.
Ask both suppliers the same three numbers: how many URLs your site serves today, how many of those they intend to preserve unchanged, and how many rows the redirect map will have. Any supplier who cannot answer the first has not looked.
Then ask what happens if a page turns out to be missing content after launch. A defect window answers it. Silence means a change request.
Then compare the six line items rather than the totals. Two quotes with the same total can allocate 60 percent to build and 10 percent to migration, or the reverse, and on a site with history the second is the one that keeps your traffic.
When is this the wrong thing to spend on?
When the site is a set of pages that rarely change. A brochure or service site does not need a component framework, and a static rebuild produces the same fast, crawlable result for meaningfully less, with far less to maintain over five years.
It is also wrong when nobody on your side writes JavaScript. A React site is an application you own, and handing that to a business with no technical person recreates the developer dependency the rebuild was meant to end.
And it is wrong when the money would do more elsewhere. A site whose real problem is that its pages do not say what the business does will reproduce that problem faithfully in a faster framework. Fix the words first, on the site you already have, then decide.
The reverse also deserves saying. If your site has genuine application behaviour, shared interactive state, or a team already fluent in React, the premium is buying something real, and the bands at the top of this page are what that costs done properly. The running cost comparison against staying put is in what does a WordPress site really cost per year, and whether a rebuild pays at all in is a website rebuild worth the money.
Key takeaways: reading a US React migration quote
Three bands: 8,000 to 30,000 freelance, 25,000 to 120,000 agency, 60,000 upward once real application behaviour is in scope.
Design is not the variable. The build is a quarter to a third of the hours, and the rest is proportional to how much history the site carries.
Six line items decide whether a quote is a migration or a build. Inventory, URL policy, redirect map with testing, build, parity checks, and launch verification with a defect window.
React costs 30 to 60 percent more than an equivalent static build and leaves you owning an application. That premium is worth paying for genuine application behaviour and very little else.
What people ask next
What does it cost to migrate WordPress to React in the US? Roughly 8,000 to 30,000 dollars with a freelancer, 25,000 to 120,000 with an agency, and 60,000 upward once real application behaviour is involved. The spread reflects scope rather than quality. WPBuildAI itemises the migration work separately from the build, because that is the line where a cheap quote and an expensive one genuinely differ.
Why do quotes vary by a factor of five? Because they are pricing different projects. A build quote covers designing and coding pages. A migration quote adds the crawl, the URL policy, the redirect map, content parity checks and launch verification, which is roughly three quarters of the elapsed time on a site with history and none of it is visible in a mockup.
What should be itemised in a React migration quote? Six lines: content and URL inventory, URL policy, redirect map with testing, the front end build, content parity checks, and launch verification with a post launch window. If redirects appear as a phrase inside a paragraph rather than as a line with hours against it, the archive is not really in scope.
Is React more expensive than other rebuilds? Yes, typically 30 to 60 percent more than a static site generator for the same pages, because components are written rather than assembled and a design system you would otherwise get free has to be authored. The ongoing cost is also higher, since you now own an application with dependencies that update.
When should you not pay for a React migration at all? When the site is a set of pages that rarely change, since a static rebuild gives the same speed for meaningfully less with far less to maintain. Also when nobody on your side writes JavaScript, because you would own an application without the ability to run it, and when the real problem is that the pages do not say what the business does.
