03 · Technology
Off WordPress, with every URL accounted for.
An established WordPress site can become what holds the business back: pages that stay slow after real performance work, hosting that keeps costing more, plugins nobody dares remove and updates that need watching every week.
Moving is not always the answer. We first audit what the site does and what it has earned in search, then tell you plainly whether to move, to modernize the WordPress site you have, or to leave it alone.
If moving is right, you get a static Astro site with no database or plugins to patch on the public side: every URL mapped, changed ones redirected, content carried over intact and the cutover rehearsed on staging.
Two clients, Roseville Landscape Material Supply and Logistics Assistance Now, have moved off WordPress with us; the questions below say what each move shows.
What you walk away with
- An inventory of what the current site actually does: content model, plugins, integrations, redirects and SEO equity.
- Every URL mapped to its Astro equivalent, with 301 redirects for any deliberate restructuring.
- Content and data exported to a structured format, with nothing lost and nothing silently transformed.
- A Lighthouse baseline before the migration and validation against agreed targets after launch.
- A cutover validated on staging, with the old site serving until the new one is verifiably correct.
- An honest call, before any work starts, on whether you should migrate at all.
What it covers
- Pre-migration architecture audit
- Content model, custom post types, plugins doing real work and plugins doing nothing, integrations, redirects, URL structure and an SEO equity inventory. We map the territory before we move it.
- Content and data preservation
- Posts, pages, custom post types, taxonomies, ACF data, media library and comments, exported to a structured format Astro can consume cleanly.
- URL and redirect preservation
- Every URL maps one to one to its Astro equivalent wherever possible, and any deliberate restructuring gets a 301 redirect, so search equity carries forward.
- Headless WordPress or fully static
- Keep WordPress as the editing tool with Astro reading its API at build time, or move the content into Markdown or MDX in the repository and retire WordPress. We plan either path properly.
- Performance baseline and validation
- A Lighthouse baseline before the migration, targets agreed up front, and the same measurements after launch, so you see the difference in numbers rather than take it on trust.
- Rehearsed cutover
- A staging site checked against production and a coordinated DNS switch, planned so visitors never see a broken state.
Is it the right fit?
Right for you if
- Your site runs on WordPress today and Core Web Vitals stay poor despite real performance work.
- Your pages are marketing, content or product pages that don't need to be generated on every request.
- A small editorial team that is comfortable with a headless or repository-based content workflow.
- Hosting costs and plugin sprawl that have outgrown what the site needs to do.
Probably not if
- High-frequency publishing by a non-technical team that wants to stay on WordPress: consider WordPress modernization or a headless build.
- Complex membership or community layers.
- Deeply integrated transactional commerce.
- A new site with no WordPress history: that is Astro development.
- Choosing Astro only because someone said it would be fast.
Migrate, modernize or leave it alone
A move off WordPress earns its cost when WordPress itself is the constraint. When the trouble is a heavy theme, too many plugins or an install that has fallen behind, WordPress modernization is usually the better spend, and your team keeps the editor it knows.
If you can’t yet tell which case you are in, start with the Performance & Architecture Audit: a paid, fixed-scope diagnostic that ends in a written verdict (rebuild, targeted refactor or leave it alone) and findings you can use with us, with another team or on your own.
How the work runs
Every engagement moves through the same five stages, with one team throughout.
Understand
A first conversation and a look at what already exists: your position, your customers’ path, your traffic and your technology.
Define
Positioning, scope and architecture decided deliberately and written down, so everyone knows what is being built and why.
Design
Brand, content and interface designed together, against those decisions rather than the fashion of the month.
Build
Built with speed, accessibility and security as requirements, and reviewed on a staging site before anything goes live.
Improve
Launch is the start. We measure what matters, fix what drifts and report in plain language.
By field
Further reading
- WordPress Migration Guide 2026How to move a WordPress site to a new host, a rebuilt theme, headless WordPress or Astro without losing content, rankings or uptime, step by step.
- Enterprise WordPress Migration: The Zero-Downtime BlueprintHow to move a large, revenue-critical WordPress site without downtime, broken URLs or lost orders: a five-phase framework from audit to post-launch checks.
- Astro vs Next.js: Which Framework for a Marketing Site in 2026?Astro vs Next.js for a content or marketing site: how they differ on performance, complexity and cost, and a clear rule for choosing between them.
- Headless CMS vs. WordPress: A Decision FrameworkWhen WordPress is the right CMS, when a headless CMS earns its extra moving parts, and five questions that settle the choice for your team and budget.
WordPress-to-Astro migration: common questions
Will we lose our search rankings when we move from WordPress to Astro?
Migrations lose rankings through broken URLs, missing redirects and dropped metadata, so those are what we protect. URLs are kept one to one where possible, every deliberate change gets a 301 redirect, and content, schema, internal links and canonical tags are carried across and checked on staging. Nobody can honestly guarantee rankings, but this removes the usual ways a move loses them.
What have you moved off WordPress, and what changed?
Two of our case studies are moves off WordPress. Roseville Landscape Material Supply, a client since October 2021, moved from WordPress to Astro on 6 July 2024. The Internet Archive's copy of its WordPress homepage from 14 June 2024 named 58 script files and 80 stylesheets for the browser to fetch; its Astro homepage from 26 July 2024 named 2 and 3. That is a count of files on two dated pages, not a measure of the whole site's speed or a promise for yours. Logistics Assistance Now ran on WordPress with Elementor on GoDaddy hosting, archived up to December 2025, and by October 2026 was a 79-page Astro site. For redirects, see Roseville Star Ready Mix: an Astro site we refactored, not a move off WordPress, where 13 retired addresses each redirect to their closest replacement.
When is a WordPress-to-Astro migration the right call, and when is it not?
It is the right call when WordPress has become the constraint rather than the foundation: Core Web Vitals stay poor despite real performance work, hosting costs keep climbing, the plugin list is out of control, and nobody publishes often enough to justify the moving parts. It is the wrong call when WordPress is doing things Astro can't easily replace: frequent publishing by a non-technical team, complex community or membership layers, or deeply integrated commerce. Then WordPress modernization is usually the better spend. We tell you which case applies before recommending the work.
What happens to our WordPress content: a full export, or headless?
Both paths work, and your team decides which. Some clients keep WordPress as a headless CMS, with Astro reading the WordPress REST or GraphQL API at build time, so the editing workflow doesn't change and the published site is fully static. Others move the content into Markdown or MDX in the Astro repository, which is the fastest option and removes WordPress from the picture entirely.
What about forms, comments, search and other dynamic features?
Forms go through dedicated services such as Netlify Forms, Formspree or custom endpoints. Comments, if you need them, can stay on headless WordPress, move to a service like Hyvor or Disqus, or be removed, which is often the right answer on a marketing site. Search becomes a client-side index such as Pagefind, or a hosted service such as Algolia or Meilisearch. Astro's islands architecture keeps the interactive pieces interactive without slowing the static ones.
How long does a WordPress-to-Astro migration take?
Audit and architecture: 1 to 2 weeks. Build and content transfer: 3 to 6 weeks, depending on the site's complexity, the number of custom post types and the integrations. Staging validation and cutover: 1 week. Most engagements land in a window of 6 to 10 weeks. Sites with heavy custom plugin logic or complex content models take longer, because the audit and architecture phases get heavier, and that is the right place to spend the time.
What happens to hosting costs after the move?
They usually go down. WordPress needs PHP, a database and often a managed host charging premium rates. A static Astro site can be served from a CDN with no application server, on platforms such as Netlify, Cloudflare Pages or Vercel, typically for less. There is also far less on the public site for an attacker to probe.
How is this different from your Astro development service?
This service is for a site that lives on WordPress today and carries content, URLs and rankings you can't afford to lose; the audit, URL mapping and cutover are most of the work. Astro development covers new Astro builds where there is nothing to migrate. If you are not sure either is right, tell us what you're building and we will say which applies.