What does a “headless WordPress” migration actually cost?

$12,000 — $48,000. The variance is almost entirely editorial parity — the number of editorial states the existing site supports that the new front-end has to reproduce — not the framework choice.

Cost breakdown for a typical $24,000 migration

• $3,000 · Discovery + editorial inventory. Every page template, every block, every editorial state catalogued. Two weeks. If the buyer skips this, the migration overruns.
• $8,000 · Next.js front-end (or your framework of choice). Type-safe data layer, ISR, image pipeline, structured data.
• $5,000 · Editorial parity. Reproducing every existing component in the new front-end, including the ones nobody documented.
• $4,000 · Hosting + edge config. Vercel/Cloudflare/Netlify setup, custom domains, preview branches.
• $4,000 · Cutover + warranty. URL parity, 301 map, search re-index, a 30-day post-launch fix window.

What makes it more expensive

WooCommerce (add 60 — 90% to the budget; checkout is the hard part), Polylang/WPML with locale-specific block variants, and any editorial workflow that depends on plugin-rendered HTML you can’t reproduce.

If you’re under $40k of total budget, headless is rarely the right answer. The honest essay on when headless wins ↗.