Moving From WordPress: What Comes Across and What Gets Left Behind
Posts, pages and images convert to plain files with one command. Plugins, comments and page-builder layouts each need a decision of their own.
How hard a move from WordPress is depends on one thing: how much of the site is words and pictures, and how much is plugins.
What comes across
Posts and pages come across in one file. In WordPress, Tools, then Export, then All content gives you an XML file holding every post and page (WordPress documentation).
A converter turns that file into Markdown, which a site generator can use. wordpress-export-to-markdown runs with one command, npx wordpress-export-to-markdown, asks a few questions, writes each post as its own file with its title, date, categories and tags at the top, and downloads the images. wordpress-to-hugo-exporter is a WordPress plugin that does the same for Hugo.
Your addresses can come across too, either kept as they were or redirected to new ones. That is tomorrow’s post.
What gets left behind
The plugins. Go down the list and sort each one:
- Forms, booking and newsletter plugins: our forms, booking widget and newsletter do those jobs, with nothing to install.
- SEO plugins: each page’s title and description move into its front matter, and Hugo writes the sitemap itself.
- Caching and security plugins: nothing replaces them, because there is nothing on the server for them to do.
- Anything else: ask what it did for visitors, and look for a way to do that on a static site, or let it go.
Comments. A static site has no comment system of its own. You can keep the old comments as part of each post, add a hosted comment service, or stop taking comments.
Page-builder layouts. Elementor, Divi and their like store layouts in their own format, which does not convert into clean Markdown. Pages built with them need rebuilding as templates, and on some sites that is the biggest single job in the move.
A shop. WooCommerce needs a server, so it cannot come across as it is. Move the products to a cart service such as Snipcart, which puts a basket and checkout on your new pages, or move the shop to Shopify and show its products on your pages with Shopify’s Buy Button. What a static site is, and when you need something else names the options.
Who edits afterwards
Decide this before the move. Whoever updates the site will either edit Markdown files and push them to Git, or use a Git-based content editor, which saves to the repository from a page in the browser.
Build the converted site on a staging site first, with a password on it, and compare it page by page with the old one before you switch.
Start with the export file. It shows you, in one place, how much of your site is words.
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