Moving to Sanity without a six-month agency redesign

When a team asks a traditional agency to move their site to Sanity, the quote usually comes back at $50,000 to $100,000 and four to six months. Most of that budget is paying for a redesign nobody asked for.

Suppose your marketing site already looks the way it should. You paid a designer or an agency to get the brand right a year ago, the pages convert well, and nobody on the executive team is asking for a new visual identity. The problem is underneath: the Webflow CMS is hitting its limits, publishing is fragile, pages load slowly on mobile, and you want the content in Sanity.

Then you talk to three headless CMS agencies. Every one of them pitches a twelve-to-twenty-week discovery, brand workshops, Figma explorations, a React application build, and a budget in the high five figures.

That happens because traditional agencies are staffed to sell redesigns. A clean platform migration without a redesign does not feed a six-person creative department, so they bundle the two together whether you need a new design or not.

Why bundling a redesign with a CMS move breaks both

Changing how a site looks and changing how a site is engineered at the same time is the single biggest cause of stalled website projects:

1. Design committees stall engineering. When every template has to be re-imagined in Figma and approved by stakeholders before a component can be coded, a four-week engineering job stretches into a five-month calendar.
2. Search performance loses its baseline. If you change your URL structure, your copy, your page layout, and your rendering stack on the same Tuesday, and organic traffic dips two weeks later, nobody can tell which variable caused it. Keeping the design and copy constant isolates the technical move so search equity is straightforward to verify.
3. Application frameworks bloat the scope. Many agencies default to building marketing sites as heavy single-page applications because that is what their product engineers write. For a marketing site where every visitor reads the same pages, shipping a full React runtime adds complexity and maintenance cost without helping editors publish. See Astro vs Next.js for a marketing site.

Traditional agency replatforming vs an Everbase migration

Traditional headless agency

• Bundles visual discovery, Figma redesign, and engineering into a 4 to 6 month program.
• Scoped on time-and-materials or large retainers across a multi-person account team.
• Changes layout, copy, URLs, and CMS at once, making SEO regressions hard to diagnose.
• Hands over a custom application that still needs a developer ticket for every layout tweak.

Right only when the brand itself is being overhauled from the ground up.

Everbase same-design migration

• Keeps your existing visual design and rebuilds it as clean Astro components in 4 to 6 weeks.
• Fixed price agreed in writing after mapping your templates, collections, and integrations.
• Designs a deliberate Sanity schema around your real content and migrates every item and asset.
• Includes 30 days of post-launch hypercare, with optional Slack agent and Partner QA afterwards.

Right when the design works and the goal is owning the codebase and Sanity CMS quickly.

What a same-design migration to Sanity and Astro includes

Keeping the design does not mean exporting messy builder HTML and wrapping it in a script. As explained in Webflow export to Astro: what moves and what must be rebuilt, a real migration rebuilds the site cleanly so it is easy to operate for years:

• A Sanity schema modeled for editors. Flat builder collections and workaround fields (feature_1, feature_2) are redesigned into reusable Sanity documents, references, and Portable Text blocks. Read modeling content in Sanity for a marketing site and Webflow to Sanity migration.
• Astro components with zero unnecessary JavaScript. Every template is rebuilt as typed Astro components styled with CSS tokens, shipping fast static HTML from Cloudflare's edge.
• Automated content, asset, and URL migration. Every collection item, image, meta tag, canonical URL, and structured data block is migrated and checked against the live site inventory.
• Integrations and forms verified end to end. HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, analytics, consent banners, and scheduling embeds are wired and tested through to the final record.
• 30 days of hypercare included. After cutover, I watch Search Console indexing, traffic, redirects, and form submissions for thirty days as part of the fixed migration fee.

Where a migration quote actually lands

Because the visual design is already settled on your live site, scoping a migration is an inventory problem rather than a guessing game. I count the templates, inspect the CMS relationships, check the custom code and integrations, and give you one fixed number before any work begins.

You can see the published bands on the cost page:

• A small established site with up to about five templates and a simple CMS starts at the published floor.
• An established marketing site with relational Sanity schemas, CRM integrations, and a real URL history lands in the middle band.
• A complex move with many unique templates, deep multi-reference models, and heavy custom interactions lands in the upper band.

If you actually want a visual redesign or net-new pages, we can either scope that separately or handle it section by section after launch through Continuous development.

How to start

If you know you want your content in Sanity and your code in a repository your team owns, you do not need a six-week discovery phase to find out what it costs:

1. Run the migration cost calculator for an immediate ballpark based on your template count and CMS setup.
2. Read the Webflow to Astro migration guide and eight questions to ask a Webflow to Astro developer.
3. Send me your site URL. I will review the live site, map what your collections become in Sanity, and reply with a written scope and fixed quote.