Migrate platforms without breaking your business
Move from Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, or any legacy platform to a modern stack — without losing SEO, content, or uptime.
Website Migration in South Africa
WeMakeSites migrates websites from legacy or unsuitable platforms (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy site builders, outdated WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) to modern stacks — usually Next.js, Shopify (for e-commerce) or maintained WordPress. Migrations preserve every URL where possible, redirect cleanly where URLs must change, migrate content with structure intact, and rebuild Core Web Vitals from the ground up. Pricing starts at R7,500 for small sites, R15,000–R40,000 for larger or more complex platforms. Most migrations complete in 3–5 weeks. Common drivers are platform lock-in (Wix is impossible to truly leave with content intact unless done carefully), poor performance (Squarespace and shared WordPress hosts), missing functionality you've outgrown, or rising platform fees. We've migrated dozens of sites; the playbook is well-tested.
Why this matters
Platform migrations are the single highest-risk web project, and most agencies don't have the playbook to do them safely. We've seen migrations that destroyed years of organic traffic, broke order history, lost customer accounts, scrambled product variants, and dumped 80% of internal links into 404s. None of that is necessary if you migrate carefully.
We start with a complete export and audit of the current site. URL list, redirect map, content inventory, schema audit, traffic-and-rankings snapshot, technical specs of the current platform's quirks. We then build the new site in parallel — content migrated, structure rebuilt, URLs matched or redirected, schema preserved, integrations rewired. Nothing goes live until we've crawled the new site exhaustively and verified every URL behaves as expected.
Downtime is minimised. For most static-site migrations we cut over via DNS in a single window with zero perceived downtime. For e-commerce, we run a maintenance window during low-traffic hours, freeze new orders briefly, complete the cutover, and verify the first orders end-to-end on the new platform.
The most common migrations we handle are: Wix or Squarespace to Next.js or modern WordPress (clients fed up with platform limitations or performance), legacy WooCommerce or Magento to Shopify or modern WooCommerce (clients tired of maintenance burden), shared-hosted WordPress to managed Vercel/Cloudflare hosting (clients tired of slow performance and security incidents), and content-only migrations where the underlying platform's fine but the host is bad.
After migration we monitor Search Console for 30 days — crawl errors, indexation issues, ranking shifts. Most migrations cause a temporary 5–15% rankings dip that recovers within 4–8 weeks if redirects are correct; if it doesn't recover, that's a sign of redirect-map issues we'll fix.
What's included
How we work
Audit & plan
Full audit of current site — URLs, content, rankings, integrations, schema, redirects. We deliver a written migration plan.
Build new site
New platform set up. Content migrated via API or scraping where needed. URLs matched or redirected per the plan.
QA
Crawl new site, verify every URL, validate schema, run Lighthouse, test integrations. Nothing launches until QA passes.
Cutover
DNS cutover during a low-traffic window. For e-commerce, minimal-downtime cutover with order-state handling.
Monitor
30 days of Search Console monitoring — crawl errors, indexation, rankings. Fixes applied as needed.
Small sites R7,500–R15,000. Larger or e-commerce migrations R15,000–R40,000.
Best for
We've delivered website migration for clients across:
Where we serve
We deliver this service to clients across all 9 South African provinces. Same scope, same pricing, same turnaround nationwide.
Frequently asked questions
Related services
Tell us what you're building
Free 30-minute call to scope your project. We'll come back with a fixed-price quote and a real timeline — usually within a day.