Moving a consultancy website off Wix to Next.js: cost and risks

The verdict in three sentences

A consultancy paying around €300 a year for Wix saves very little if its site is stuck at a Lighthouse score of 48 and barely ranks in its second language. Migrating to Next.js makes sense once the site carries more than 40 pages and around a hundred articles, provided a complete 301 redirect map is delivered before switchover. Done carelessly, it costs 5 to 15% of organic traffic for several weeks; done properly, it pays for itself with one or two signed engagements.

Why Wix hits a ceiling for a bilingual consultancy

Take a strategy consultancy with 15 consultants based in Berlin. It serves German Mittelstand companies but also Dutch, Nordic and UK clients, so half of the decision makers it targets search in English. The Wix site has served it well for six years, but three limits show up the moment the firm wants the website to become a genuine acquisition channel.

First, performance. The site ships editor scripts, fonts and animations nobody on the team ever chose. Measured on mobile: Lighthouse score 48, LCP of 4.1 seconds, which hurts Core Web Vitals and the patience of a CFO checking the page between meetings. Second, multilingual control: the translation module imposes its own URL structure and leaves little fine-grained control over per-page metadata and hreflang tags. Third, portability: the blog exports, the pages do not, and any future redesign starts from scratch.

Going from 48 to 95 is not a trick: pre-rendered pages, images converted to AVIF and WebP, self-hosted fonts, no third-party script without a reason. For a consultancy, that speed mostly serves credibility: a slow website suggests a slow firm.

The real scope: 45 pages, 120 articles, two languages

The trap is to price a migration like an ordinary redesign. This firm has 45 pages (practice areas, industries, team, case studies, careers) and 120 articles published since 2019. Add old category URLs, tag pages and indexed images and the inventory reaches roughly 210 lines in the redirect file. That file, not the design, is what protects your rankings.

Here is a cost breakdown, as a 2026 order of magnitude seen on the German and Dutch markets for a serious agency or independent studio.

The high end assumes English copy rewritten by a native editor and fully custom templates; the low end assumes clean existing translations and a design adapted from a solid base. At Kolonell, a Premium showcase site sits between 2,000,000 and 3,500,000 FCFA (3,050 to 5,340 EUR); migrating the 120 articles and the second language is quoted after the inventory, and Standard maintenance is 75,000 FCFA a month (114 EUR).

301 redirects: where traffic actually gets lost

A migration does not lose traffic by nature. It loses traffic when URLs Google knows vanish without a precise destination. The costly mistakes look the same from one project to the next.

The method that works: export every URL from Search Console plus a full crawl, map each old URL to its exact new equivalent, test the file on staging, switch on a Tuesday morning, then check 404 errors daily for two weeks. With that protocol the dip usually stays within a few percent, traffic recovers in four to six weeks, then climbs above the old ceiling thanks to speed.

Mini case study

Julia, managing partner of the Berlin firm, gets 2,800 organic visits a month. The contact rate is 0.5%, so 14 enquiries a month, and one enquiry in 15 becomes an engagement worth €18,000 on average.

The firm sets a budget of €11,000. In the six weeks after switchover traffic drops 8%, roughly 340 lost visits and fewer than 2 enquiries. Three months later traffic reaches 3,640 visits (+30%) thanks to the English pages and the speed gain. That is 4 more enquiries a month, 48 a year, so about 3 additional engagements: 3 × €18,000 = €54,000 of extra revenue. The first engagement covers the project; saving the €300 Wix subscription is just a bonus.

FAQ

How long does a Wix to Next.js migration take for 45 pages and 120 articles?

Plan for 6 to 10 weeks: 2 weeks of audit and inventory, 3 to 5 weeks of production, 1 week of redirect QA. Post-launch monitoring adds 8 weeks of light oversight.

Will we lose traffic during the migration?

A 5 to 15% drop is seen when redirects are incomplete. With an exhaustive, tested 301 file, the dip usually stays under 5% and recovers within 4 to 6 weeks.

Can consultants keep editing content without a developer?

Yes: a headless CMS lets them publish in German and English from a simple interface. Half a day of training is enough for 3 or 4 authors.

Does a bilingual site require professional translation?

For senior decision makers, native proofreading is recommended: it often costs €800 to €2,500 on this kind of scope. Unedited machine translation shows and damages the firm's credibility.

What does hosting cost after leaving Wix?

A static or hybrid Next.js site costs between €0 and €240 a year to host, depending on traffic and provider. Application maintenance remains the real recurring cost.

Let's scope your project. We map your URL inventory, your second language and your redirect plan before any switchover, on a 6 to 10 week schedule. Detailed quote within 48 h. WhatsApp +221 77 596 93 33.