Migrating From Wordpress To Astro

Contrary to what Linkedin and Reddit users would have you believe, migrating from Wordpress to Astro is a pretty involved process that you wouldn’t want to just throw Claude Code at and call it a day. Your entire business runs on Wordpress, and there are a lot of things to shore up before you make the jump to ensure you don’t blow up your SEO performance. If you only run a near-stock Wordpress theme with a few plugins, external forms (CRM forms, marketing platforms), no big deal. But if you’re running a larger website with posts, forms, blogs, Yoast SEO, etc - you’ll want to be careful.

Here is a pretty big list of things we check at Periapse Labs.

Wordpress To Astro Checklist

The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure to note these things. I’m going to be exhaustive here because it’s really important not to mess any of these up.

Is your site www or non-www?
Look at your posts and blogs by popularity (check Google Search Console) and make sure the URLS make sense and are structured.
1. If your popular URLS are all flat at the root, we need to get in front of that by leveraging Netlify or Cloudflare redirect rules to route them to their proper pages.
Do you use any redirect libraries in Wordpress to create 301’s from incoming pages to new pages?
1. If so, you’ll want to make sure to note those down for redirect rules. Export them to a CSV.
Do you use any Review Plugins?
1. If you do, you’ll need to roll your own way to pull reviews. APIs like SERPAPI can generate JSON that you can bring in before building
2. You’ll need to roll the Review schema into your Service page(s) to surface relevant product reviews.
Do you use Yoast SEO?
1. If yes, you’ll need to manually write your own schema for Google’s Knowledge Graph
2. You want to make sure to generate your company schema correctly
Do you have blog posts?
1. Do you want to write in Wordpress or a tool like Periapse CMS? Both are possible
2. You can also use the WP GraphQL API
Do you have any forms that are created using Wordpress plugins?
1. You’ll want to port these to local forms, with ZOD validation, and potentially use Cloudflare Turnstile for bot protection
2. Serverless functions are powerful when using Cloudflare Page(s) projects. Netlify functions also work well
3. You can use Cloudflare email service for sending\routing for notifications
4. Your serverless function can connect to your CRM via a Rest API to create leads
Does your country\jurisdiction require Accessibility?
1. If so, you’ll want to make sure to run pa11y to audit your website. Ensure aria-labels are present where required, etc.
Does your country\jurisdiction require cookie disclosures?
1. If so, you’ll want to roll your own or use a third party like CookieYes.
Do you use WPRocket or other popular Wordpress optimization plugins that include Javascript execution delays?
1. You need to account for this carefully when asking Claude to build things because it may not do what you expect. Sometimes it’s simple, sometimes it’s not. Things like asking for intersection observers on Wistia videos and Youtube iframes are really important.
If you have a custom robots.txt or Yoast SEO config, make sure to note which routes you don’t want indexed.
Don’t forget to rebuild category and tag pages if they are indexed.
Do you have any other Wordpress specific customizations that require a database backend?
1. These are things like plugins for Affiliate marketing, ads, etc which require more customization. We leverage cloudflare D1 and serverless functions for this (workers).

Main Risks From Migrating Wordpress To Astro

I’m going to highlight the top 3 risks you run when doing this yourself. If you ask Claude about these ahead of time, it will help.

Google Rankings Disappear

The biggest risk when migrating from Wordpress to Astro is going to be missing important pages - resulting in a 404, missing important schema that your business needs, and risking accidental removal from Google due to something an agent misses. This can be small, even something such as accidentally swapping from a www to a non-www domain will take some time to process for Google.

Writers Don’t Understand How To Publish Posts

The second biggest risk when migrating from Wordpress to Astro is breaking your production pipeline for writers. We run a few websites that have a backend of Wordpress, build the site statically, and then ship it without editors needing to step out of their Wordpress pipeline. This includes reading author attributes, users, and making sure that the final page outputs with all the relevant schema, links, and renders correctly.

Performance Tanks

This is a weird one, right? No server, no Wordpress, why is it slower? Well, that’s Claude. Let’s run through what will happen if you asked Claude to port a legacy website without any technical guidence:

It may load the 8 fonts it sees when it scrapes the HTML, because they are all in use
1. It won’t load the variable fonts, it will just use the CDN
2. You may not even realize these fonts are in use, it could be plugins that load them
Tracking tools? Sure, throw them all at the top
Hero video? Let’s inline it without any thought - no lazy loading, no HLS encoding, no chunks, just the whole mp4
Javascript libraries? Let’s install one with 4 stars on Github
Inline CSS
1. Now every page looks slightly different. How fun.
Adds AI micro-animations to everything on earth
Decides to use <img> tags instead of the astro image element - now we dont have flexible sizes and all those several megabyte images we pulled are going to slow down the build process
1. It may just link to the assets on production as well, which, obviously, will move when you ship

All of these are 100% avoidable, but you need to have someone who understands both Wordpress and Astro sitting there telling it how to behave and what trade-offs can be made for existing legacy items.

Get a Quote

If you’d like us to take a look at your website, please connect - we’ll take a look and send you a quote. We can also port Duda, Squarespace, and other websites over to Astro as well.