Move off WordPress and leave the plugin upkeep behind

Migrating WordPress sites to hand-written Next.js for businesses across Halifax and West Yorkshire. Your content and your permalinks come across. The plugin updates, the admin login and the maintenance that came with them do not.

What you are leaving behind

Nobody moves off WordPress because of how it looks. They move because of what it takes to keep it standing up.

Off the plugin treadmill

A WordPress site is really the twenty or thirty plugins holding it up, and each one is something that can break, conflict, or quietly stop being maintained. The rebuild replaces that stack with hand-written code, so there is nothing to update and nothing sitting there going out of date.

Your permalinks keep working

WordPress generates far more addresses than most owners realise: category and tag archives, author pages, attachment pages, dated archives, feed URLs. Every one gets crawled and mapped before launch, because the addresses nobody remembers are usually the ones holding links.

The content comes out, the database stays behind

Posts, pages, media and menus are exported and rebuilt as pages generated at build time. Afterwards there is no database sitting between a visitor and your content, which is most of where the jump from a mid-40s PageSpeed score to 95 plus comes from.

Nothing left to log into

There is no wp-admin, no user accounts to manage and no login page being probed a few hundred times a night by something automated. A site with no admin panel has very little surface left to attack.

How a WordPress migration runs

The audit is the stage that decides everything else. What looks like a five-page site is often five pages and thirty plugins.

  1. Audit the install

    Which plugins are load-bearing and which are leftovers from three providers ago, what the theme is doing, whether a page builder is involved, and where custom fields are hiding content that will not show up in an export. This decides how much of the site is content and how much is configuration.

  2. Export the content

    Posts, pages, media library and menus come out through WordPress's own export, plus a full crawl to catch what it misses. Page builder layouts do not export cleanly, so anything built in Elementor or Divi gets rebuilt from what is on the page rather than from the builder's stored data.

  3. Rebuild and map the permalinks

    The replacement is built on Next.js while WordPress stays live and keeps earning. Every existing address, including the archive and feed URLs WordPress created without being asked, is matched to its new home and written down before anything moves.

  4. Cut over and decommission

    A DNS change at a quiet hour, then redirect, form and SSL checks and a new sitemap to Search Console. Only once that is verified does the old WordPress install get shut down, rather than left running unpatched on a server nobody looks at.

What is included

Priced as a build of the same size. The export and permalink work is part of the job rather than a line added at the end.

  • Plugin and theme audit
  • Content, media and menu export
  • Permalink and archive URL mapping
  • 301 redirect map for every URL
  • Rebuild on Next.js
  • Contact forms rebuilt without plugins
  • Staging site for sign-off
  • Post-launch indexing checks

Questions we get asked

The page builder one catches more people out than any other.

Will I lose my blog posts?
No. Posts are the most portable thing in WordPress and they come across with their content, images and dates intact. Their addresses are preserved too, so anything that was ranking or had been linked to carries on working rather than landing on a 404.
My site was built with Elementor or Divi. Does that change anything?
It changes the export rather than the outcome. Page builders store layouts in their own format inside the database, so there is no clean way to lift them out. The text and images come across, and the layout is rebuilt from what the page actually looks like. It is more work than a plain theme, and it is the single most common reason a WordPress migration takes longer than expected.
What about my WooCommerce shop?
That is a bigger job than a content migration, because products, variants, customer accounts and a working checkout all have to move rather than just pages. It is quoted as an eCommerce build rather than a migration. Worth a conversation before anything else, since how you take payments afterwards is the decision everything hangs on.
Will my site be down while it moves?
Minutes rather than days. WordPress stays live and keeps taking enquiries the whole time the replacement is being built, and the switch itself is a DNS change. The mechanics of the cutover, the domain and the timing are the same for any platform and are covered on the general migration page.
How much does a WordPress migration cost?
The same as a build of the same size, because that is what it is. Starter sites of one to five pages start at £495 and business sites of five to fifteen pages start at £850, paid 50% upfront and 50% on launch. The plugin audit, content export and permalink mapping are part of that rather than extras on the end.