Why Website Migration Pays Off in a Crisis: The Economics of Three Scenarios, in Real Numbers

Structured Answer: In a crisis, website migration pays off not through “sales growth” but by eliminating losses that are already happening: slow loading eats the visitors you have already paid to attract, and an aging platform blocks catalog development without fresh spending. The right comparison is not “the cost of the move” but three scenarios over 12 months: a one-off migration (250,000 / 400,000 / 600,000 rubles by catalog size), a package with migration and promotion (50,000 / 70,000 / 100,000 rubles per month, migration included), and doing nothing. In the package, maintenance after subtracting the migration comes to roughly 29,000-50,000 rubles per month, below the price of the same volume of work bought separately. And there are cases where migration is not needed; we say so honestly before the contract.

In a crisis, budgets get cut, and “website development” is usually first under the knife. The logic is understandable: pay now, see results someday later. The problem is that this decision compares the incomparable: the migration invoice is visible, while the losses from a slow, inconvenient site are not. Nobody bills them as a separate line.

Here is the economics without “it will double your sales” promises: on our real prices, real measurements, and with an honest caveat about when a migration is unnecessary.

A crisis does not cancel the website — it changes the question

When sales fall, the question shifts from “how do we grow” to “how do we keep what we have”. And the website is the cheapest sales channel you already own: the traffic is already paid for, the customers are already coming. If they leave at this step, you are paying for ads and SEO and losing the result at the moment the page loads.

So the subject is not “a shiny new platform” but losses on traffic you have already bought. Removing them is exactly what migration does.

Three scenarios over 12 months

Scenario	What you pay	What you get	Risk
One-off migration	250,000 / 400,000 / 600,000 ₽	Catalog and template transfer, 301 redirects, a month of indexation control	Maintenance and promotion afterwards are separate, from 15,000 ₽/month
Package with migration	50,000 / 70,000 / 100,000 ₽/month × 12	Migration + development hours + SEO/GEO/AEO + SLA	12-month contract; early termination recalculates the migration at the one-off price
Do nothing	0 ₽ now	You keep the money this month	Speed and platform losses do not disappear — they just never appear on an invoice

The third scenario wins on budget not because it is cheaper, but because its price is invisible. That is the main trap of this decision.

The package arithmetic, counted honestly

Take the Rost plan: 50,000 ₽/month on a 12-month contract is 600,000 ₽. It includes a Small migration, priced at 250,000 ₽ one-off. Subtract it: 350,000 ₽ for 12 months of maintenance, about 29,200 ₽/month for 6 hours of development, SEO/GEO/AEO and a 24-hour SLA. For comparison: the Promotion plan in the maintenance grid is 60,000 ₽/month for a comparable set without a migration.

Rost+: 70,000 × 12 = 840,000 ₽, of which the Medium migration is 400,000 ₽. That leaves 440,000 ₽ for the year, about 36,700 ₽/month for 12 hours of development, the smart filter and search, AI content generation and a 4-hour SLA. Buying the same list separately would cost noticeably more.

Dominanta: 100,000 × 12 = 1,200,000 ₽, with a Large migration at 600,000 ₽. Maintenance is 600,000 ₽ for the year, exactly 50,000 ₽/month for 20 hours, 1C integrations and a priority queue; the Strategy plan in the grid starts at 90,000 ₽/month.

This is not a promotional discount: the package is simply sold whole, which makes the move cheaper inside it than separately. But the scheme has a price — a one-year commitment. If the project might close in three months, take the one-off migration; it is the more honest instrument.

Why this pays off now, not “eventually”

Two measurements from our practice — anonymized, but real numbers from real sites that came to us asking about a move.

An insurance company, a catalog of about 60,000 SKUs. LCP (the time to render the main content) was 16 seconds. The “poor” threshold in Google’s metric is 4 seconds. The site was four times slower than the line after which a visitor almost certainly leaves. No ad budget survives that entry: the click is paid for, the person sees a white screen and closes the tab.

A clinic’s website. PageSpeed 0 out of 100 and a GEO score of 23 (F): failing on speed and unprepared for AI search answers — with robots.txt missing entirely. That is not “unfinished design” but a systematic loss of both channels: classic search and the AI-generated answers where a share of queries is going right now.

Note what is absent here: a promise of growth. What is present is a record of losses that happen every day while a page loads for 16 seconds. A migration with proper markup and layout removes those losses — that is the entire “payback”.

Migration risks and how they are covered

A migration is not a button. The honest risk list:

• Ranking dips. Possible for a few weeks while search engines re-crawl the new URLs. Covered by a lossless 301 redirect map, a staged launch, and a month of indexation control after go-live.
• Lost pages. Old addresses may diverge from new ones. Covered by reconciling the full URL list before the switch: old site → redirect map → manual spot checks.
• Data and integrations. Catalog, prices, stock, 1C. Covered by backups, a test environment and rollback.
• “Done and abandoned.” A move without maintenance brings the same problems back within six months. That is why the packages include development hours and monthly improvements.

No contractor can guarantee rankings — that would be a promise to control someone else’s search results. What can be guaranteed is the technology: redirects, speed, markup, the absence of errors. Those are what we fix in the contract.

When migration is not needed

To avoid selling a move to everyone, here are the cases where it will not pay off:

• the site loads fast (LCP under 2.5 seconds) and has no technical errors;
• the catalog is small — under a thousand items — and is not planned to grow several-fold;
• there are no promotion goals and the current traffic is fine;
• the budget is so tight that the move would have to be rushed, without redirects and testing.

In these cases point fixes are cheaper: speed, markup, content. We say so before the contract is signed — a project that will not pay off is bad business for both sides.

What is included in a migration

The catalog-size boundaries come from the price grid:

• Small — roughly up to 5,000 items. Catalog and content transfer, templates, redirects, launch and a month of indexation control.
• Medium — up to 30,000 items. The same plus the smart filter and search — on a catalog this size, without them the visitor cannot find the product.
• Large — 100,000+ items. Plus integrations, including 1C, and a priority work queue.

Exact timelines are calculated after a catalog audit: they depend on the state of the data and the integrations, not on eyeballing the site’s size.

What to do next

If the site is already losing traffic to speed and the catalog is hitting platform limits, calculate your scenario before deciding. Send us the site address: we will measure speed, LCP and technical condition, show what exactly is being lost right now, and compare the cost of the move against the price of doing nothing, on your numbers.

The price grid with package contents is on the tariffs page (in Russian). If you want the technology first, there is a migration course for Aspro solutions (in Russian) and a regional catalog audit breakdown.

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