What's the realistic agency cost to rebuild a GemPages-built funnel program into a hand-coded, faster-loading version?
No published figure exists. Here is the honest answer.
No published benchmark exists for rebuilding a GemPages funnel program, and Deploi will not quote one from a sample this small. The cost is driven by four countable inputs: published pages, saved Theme Sections, Custom Code elements holding third-party app snippets, and post-purchase offers. Count those four before you brief an agency. Uninstalling also leaves named snippets in theme.liquid.
Why this page declines to give you a number
We could write a range. Every agency page in this category does. We have not run enough GemPages exit projects to publish a band that would survive contact with your store, and a fabricated range is worse than no range, because you would take it into a budget meeting.
What we can give you is the thing a range would be built from, which is more useful anyway, because you can count it yourself this afternoon and hand the count to any agency.
The four things to count
1. Published pages. Open the GemPages dashboard and count live pages by type: landing pages, product pages, theme sections, ILP pages. Not templates. Published pages. Most brands guess high by a factor of two, because half the library was a test that never got unpublished.
2. Saved Theme Sections. These are the reusable blocks. Each one becomes a Liquid section with schema settings in a rebuild, and each one you can consolidate is a section you do not pay to build twice. GemPages describes them as content you "save any part of your webpage, like banners or product displays, and reuse... on other pages," edited once and updated everywhere (per GemPages Help Center, September 2026). A well-kept library shrinks this number dramatically.
3. Custom Code elements. These are the hidden ones. GemPages' Custom Code element accepts "your own HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Liquid code," and its documented integration path for any app GemPages has not built an element for is: get the app's code, paste it into a Liquid element, publish and test on the live page (per GemPages Help Center, September 2026). Every one of those is an undocumented integration that has to be re-established in the rebuild. They are also the reason rebuild estimates go wrong, because nobody has a list.
4. Post-purchase offers. Each offer needs a new home. Shopify's post-purchase page extension, a dedicated upsell app, or nothing. This is a product decision with a monthly cost attached, not a build line item.
The three exit tasks that exist regardless of page count
- Theme cleanup. GemPages adds two named blocks to
theme.liquid, wrapped in<!--Gem_Page_Header_Script-->and<!--Gem_Page_Footer_Script-->comments, callinggem-app-header-scriptsandgem-app-footer-scripts. Its removal guide instructs you to delete both blocks and then "search for any remaining files containing 'gem' and delete those as well" (per GemPages Help Center, September 2026). - URL continuity. ILP pages are served from a domain "hosted by ILP, not Shopify." Moving them onto the Shopify domain is a redirect map, and a redirect map on paid-traffic landing pages is a revenue-relevant task, not a cleanup task.
- Analytics continuity. Funnel analytics inside GemPages do not come with you. Decide before the cutover whether the replacement is GA4, a session tool or Shopify's own reporting, and instrument it before you turn anything off.
The sequence that keeps the program running
- Count the four inputs. Publish the counts to the agency in the brief.
- Consolidate first, rebuild second. Rebuilding forty pages that should be twelve sections with settings is the most expensive mistake available here.
- Rebuild the sections, not the pages. A Liquid section library with schema settings is the deliverable. Pages are assembled from it afterwards, by marketing.
- Move the highest-traffic page first and compare against its GemPages version on real traffic, before committing the rest.
- Downgrade rather than uninstall during the transition. GemPages recommends downgrading to the free plan over uninstalling, because uninstalling "can remove files and scripts needed for displaying some content."
- Clean the theme last, after nothing live depends on it.
When NOT to do this at all
- When the motivation is page speed and nobody has profiled the pages. Measure first. A builder-built page can be slow for reasons a rebuild will faithfully reproduce.
- When marketing will lose the ability to ship. A hand-coded program that requires a developer for every campaign is slower in practice than a slightly heavier page that marketing can edit at 4pm.
- When the campaign calendar is full. Rebuild between flights.
- When the library is unmanaged. Consolidate inside GemPages first, at no build cost, then decide whether a rebuild is still worth it. Sometimes the consolidation was the whole project.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: The exit cost from any page builder is set by how disciplined the section library was, not by how many pages exist. A brand with twelve well-maintained sections and eighty pages is a smaller project than a brand with forty bespoke pages and no sections. Count sections, not pages (Deploi position, September 2026).
- What we’ve seen: The Custom Code elements are what blow up the estimate. They hold app snippets, tracking, review widgets and one-off scripts that nobody inventoried, and they surface during the rebuild rather than during scoping. Asking for that list up front changes the shape of the quote.
- What we refuse to state: a dollar range or an hours band for this work. We have not shipped enough of these to publish one honestly, and the brief behind this page carries no effort band for it. When we have the sample, this page gets the number and the date it was measured.
- Where we disagree: Agency content in this category leads with a price range for exactly this question, because a range generates enquiries. We think a range quoted without a page count, a section count and a custom-code inventory is a marketing device, and we would rather publish the counting method and lose the enquiry.
- What this page adds: the four countable cost drivers, the exact theme code GemPages leaves behind, and the three exit tasks that exist independent of page count.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records