Most competition operators don’t choose their first platform badly. They choose it correctly for the stage they were at, and then leave that stage behind.
That’s a different problem to a bad build, and it shows up in a fairly predictable set of symptoms. Draw nights where the site gets sluggish in the final hour. A payment account that gets restricted, or reviewed, or quietly closed. Design limits you keep working around. Transaction fees and monthly platform costs that were trivial at £2k a month and are now a visible line in your margin. Features you need that aren’t on someone else’s roadmap.
The awkward part is that the pressure to move arrives at exactly the point where moving is most expensive. You now have entry history, a customer list, draw records, rankings, an approved merchant account and a live audience, and all of it has to survive the transition. Getting that wrong costs more than staying put on a platform you’ve outgrown.
These six UK agencies are worth considering if you’re already trading and the rebuild conversation has started.
1. Nera Marketing
Nera Marketing treat migration as a distinct piece of work rather than a new build with old content pasted in, which is the right instinct. Their process covers transferring competition data and draw history, moving customer accounts, and replacing a restricted or at-risk merchant account with a specialist gateway approved for competition transactions.
The clearest evidence they have for this is LR Luxe Comps. That operator had already launched on Shopify and hit the wall most Shopify competition builds eventually hit: the platform couldn’t support the compliance structure, the payment processing or the growth they needed. Nera rebuilt it on a bespoke WooCommerce platform with the compliance layer, Cashflows integration and instant win mechanics configured as part of the project. First month on the new build produced £30,000 in revenue, with the first payout processed within five days of launch.
Their broader observation is worth quoting to anyone still weighing this up: operators generating £10,000 a month or more typically migrate from a builder to a bespoke platform within twelve months regardless of where they started. Builds start at £2,995, and they’ve delivered 50-plus competition platforms, so the migration path is well worn rather than improvised.
The trade-off is honest enough. A bespoke rebuild costs more upfront than staying where you are, and you own the outcome rather than renting it: platform, data, payment relationship and brand.
2. RaffleLabs
RaffleLabs build custom-coded platforms with no WordPress dependency, which makes them a natural fit for operators whose frustration with their current setup is specifically about plugin bloat, platform constraints or lock-in. Six-plus years in prize competitions, with responsible-play features like spend limits, cool-off periods and self-exclusion built in alongside the compliance essentials.
If your reason for moving is that you want to be free of someone else’s framework entirely, this is the approach that goes furthest in that direction. Worth confirming directly how they handle data and draw-history transfer from an existing platform, since a fully custom rebuild has more mapping work to do than a like-for-like move.
3. Zap Competitions
Zap Competitions, trading as Think Zap, have served this niche exclusively since 2009 and run their own in-house Competition Suite platform. The relevant point for a rebuild is that they position themselves as an ongoing partner rather than a one-off build shop, with a knowledge base and post-launch support resources.
For an operator who’s outgrown a platform partly because nobody was around to help them scale it, that ongoing relationship may matter more than the build itself. Note that moving onto their proprietary suite is a platform decision in its own right, so it’s worth being clear upfront about what you’d own and what you’d be using under licence.
4. Design Hero
Design Hero frame themselves as a marketing agency first and a competition builder second, on the argument that the site is only half the job and converting traffic is the harder half.
That framing is genuinely useful for a specific type of migration: the operator whose platform is technically fine but whose growth has stalled. If your entry volumes are flat rather than your site falling over, a rebuild may not be the intervention you need, and an agency that leads with acquisition and conversion is better placed to tell you that.
5. Weptile & ShopApper
Weptile build across WooCommerce and custom PHP/Laravel depending on operator scale, and pair website work with native mobile apps through their ShopApper arm.
The migration angle here is worth thinking about carefully. If you’re rebuilding anyway, that’s the natural moment to decide whether an app belongs in your stack, because retrofitting one onto a platform later means solving entry-state consistency between app and site twice. Operators whose model leans on repeat entries and push-notification-driven draw reminders should at least price this up while the platform is in flux.
6. Design for Online
This Suffolk-based agency builds fully custom competition sites with a more developed feature set than most general web shops attempt: live odds calculators, refer-a-friend systems, points-based rewards.
They’re a smaller regional shop, which cuts both ways on a migration. Less capacity than the larger names, but feature depth at a competitive price point, and a good option if your reason for moving is specifically that you want mechanics your current platform can’t support.
Before you commission anything
Whoever you talk to, the migration questions matter more than the build questions at this stage.
Ask what happens to your entry and draw history, in detail, and get the answer in writing. Ask whether your existing merchant account moves with you or whether you’re reapplying, because reapplying means a gap and a gap means lost draws. Ask how URL structure and redirects are handled, since a competition site with any organic traffic can lose months of visibility to a careless relaunch. Ask what the cutover looks like hour by hour, and when in your draw calendar it should happen.
And ask what the platform can’t do, because the honest answer to that question is the most useful thing you’ll hear in any of these conversations. Every route on this list involves a trade-off. The operators who migrate well are the ones who picked the trade-off deliberately rather than discovering it on the second draw night.
