WordPress to Contentful migration: Benefits, tips, and best practices

Migrating from WordPress to Contentful brings big benefits: You benefit from having more control over your digital presence, your users benefit from more engaging and bespoke experiences, and your business benefits from an increased ROI for your content.

While there's a bit of extra up-front legwork involved in building a Contentful-powered blog, product site, app, or other digital experience, many creative organizations are finding it worth their while (and, in many cases, no more work than building and maintaining custom WordPress sites in the long term).

Here's what you need to know about planning and implementing a WordPress to Contentful migration.

The challenges WordPress presents to developers

It's not unusual for experienced WordPress developers to have a rather unfavorable view of the WordPress platform.

WordPress is hugely popular, and provides a stable and reliable platform for web content that is great for bootstrapping small projects. But for larger enterprise use cases, it can be inflexible, costly to host, and bloated, leading to maintenance and scaling difficulties.

WordPress also presents a number of challenges relating to the creation and publishing of content, leading developers and team leaders to seek alternatives.

Code tied to content (and content tied to code)

Because WordPress templates strongly tie content to appearance, you often have to adapt legacy content to a new website or app design. While it's possible to avoid WordPress template tags and use the WordPress API to retrieve content in a layout-agnostic way, this is largely sidestepping the issue by trying to treat WordPress as a headless CMS.

This also works in the other direction — if (or when) you want to change what kind of content you present, you need to update your WordPress templates to accommodate it. Re-working a WordPress site to accommodate new types of content and then revising existing content to fit the new layout can be expensive and time-consuming.

A complete separation of code and content solves this issue: Content should be stored as a single source of truth, in a way that can be formatted for any present (or future) format or use case. Contentful provides powerful content modeling tools that let you divide your content into topics (what your site is about) and assemblies (how it is put together), rather than being stuck in the rigid data model used by WordPress. 

Then, you can build flexible interfaces for content curation and management, and deliver your content to your apps, websites, billboards, emails, and other channels through our global CDN and APIs. Modeling elements of your site layout in Contentful, such as theme and layout elements, branding, and navigation, lets you swap out and update common page elements from the Contentful CMS interface without having to make code updates.

Replication of environments

Even with the new WordPress visual editor, it's still often necessary to preview each page manually to see what it will actually look like to your users. This can turn making a few small changes to a number of pages into a time-consuming task. Some changes also need to be worked on over a period of time by different people before they can be published to see their full effect. Many publishing workflows run a separate staging website for working on designs and content, previewing, and vetting it prior to sending it live for their audience.

WordPress does not make this convenient. Replicating WordPress sites usually requires cloning the website code, and then updating the configuration and any database values that reference the original site's address. While this can be automated with plugins, it is error-prone and laborious. To allow for all of this, you also need a complete second WordPress hosting infrastructure, and if your site is media-heavy, the process becomes more complex as CDN-hosted images, audio, and video must be replicated between staging and production.

In addition to structured text in Contentful being editable using a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) interface, Contentful provides tools for you to build live previews that appear alongside the content editor. Your creators see exactly how content will look once published, streamlining the creation process and ensuring that published content always looks its best.

Using multiple Contentful environments is also a solution to this that can be used in conjunction with live previews. This lets you build fully isolated development and staging infrastructure, so you can develop your code and iterate on your content in separate sandboxed environments, without affecting production. 

Security and maintenance

WordPress itself, despite some historical incidents, is considered to be quite secure provided you keep it up to date. However, no software is bug free, and the security of a WordPress website is also dependent on the security of the plugins it uses. Plugin developers may not be as careful as the core WordPress team, and there are many documented incidents of websites being hacked because of insecure plugins.

Even when plugins are properly maintained, keeping them updated and ensuring they work with your themes and hosting environment is a huge chore. Self-hosted CMS solutions like Drupal also suffer from this drawback.

Adopting a SaaS product like Contentful to power your back end relieves you of this responsibility and drastically reduces your tech team's workloads. Contentful is serious about security, and implements best practices for keeping your data secure and keeping you informed of any risks to it. The Contentful platform also provides you with the tools to manage access to resources within your organization, including user roles and permissions.

Return on investment

Businesses that monetize content need to get every cent out of each creative endeavor they publish. Similarly, commercial and ecommerce websites will want to make sure the assets they create to market their products can be readily reused to reach new venues and audiences.

Content created and published in WordPress is largely unmovable: It's difficult to migrate and use in different ways. While WordPress has an API for retrieving data, that data is stored in a WordPress-specific structure that does not lend itself to other use cases, restricting what you can do with it and limiting growth.

By putting in the extra initial investment into your own front end, backed by content modeled and hosted in Contentful, you can ensure that you get the most long-term value from your content by making it iterable and reusable, ready for omnichannel deployment to any known (and as-yet unknown) digital medium.

How do you build a great website?

The first and most important consideration when building a blog or website is your audience and what you are giving them. Once this is established, it's about providing value to them in a regular, convenient, and easy-to-consume manner, with a refined user experience.

There are several development technologies that enable these goals when building bespoke front ends and evolving your Contentful models and content production process.

Develop a content model that works for you

Decoupling code and content means that you can build a content model that works for your use case, rather than being locked into the standard WordPress content structure (posts and pages with titles, a single content blob, an unstructured media library, etc).

You should make the most of this using concepts such as topics and assemblies to break your content down into manageable, reusable, and remixable components that can be adapted for any format.

Find the right front end

WordPress is a monolith written in a mix of PHP and JavaScript for back- and frontend functionality. It's a huge codebase, and customization can be a significant undertaking, especially when trying to integrate new functionality. Building WordPress themes is often just as much (sometimes more) work than building a custom front end, as you have to account for WordPress’s existing way of doing things and its peculiarities. 

With Contentful taking care of your backend functionality, you can focus on building a front end using the tools best suited for the task in conjunction with Contentful SDKs and APIs. Contentful is completely agnostic and works with any language or framework.

This means that you can develop using React, Angular, Svelte, or any other frontend framework, and even access our APIs from your back end. You can maintain clean, focused, performant code with the functionality you need, and nothing else to clog up your codebase (or slow down your app for your users). Additionally, from a branding and innovation perspective, you are never "locked in" to a design, and can redesign your websites and apps without needing to change your backend architecture.

Go static for extra speed

Static websites (or single-page apps) delivered by a CDN have the potential to load orders of magnitude faster than dynamically generated sites built with WordPress. As with many other features, WordPress can be extended using plugins to generate static assets and deploy them to a CDN like CloudFlare, but using these will never provide the full advantages of a solution that was natively designed for this purpose.

All assets hosted in Contentful are delivered from a global high-speed CDN, and you can optionally build your front ends using a static site generator or framework that supports static site generation (like Next.js or Astro), to make sure your users are never left waiting for content to dynamically generate and download.

Automate deployments

DevOps are the practices that have evolved in the software development field for efficient and safe code development and deployment. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are a DevOps process for the automated testing of code (to make sure nothing will be broken by an update), and, on passing these tests, automated deployment.

Building CI/CD pipelines for custom front ends using online platforms and open-source tools like CircleCI (which can also be used to automate testing changes and migrating data in Contentful environments) is relatively straightforward. You can automate the testing of the visual presentation of your apps using tools like Playwright, and ensure that all of your content continues to render correctly when you make a change to your site's appearance.

Fully leverage your tools

Contentful is more than just a headless CMS and CDN: It's a complete, customizable content platform that is being continually updated with input from our community, to meet new developer and creator needs.

Migrating a WordPress site to Contentful

The biggest strength of WordPress is also its greatest weakness: It's built for a broad use case, making it popular, but when it comes to building truly unique and effective experiences, one size does not fit all.

When building a solution to replace WordPress, careful planning is paramount so that you have a solid foundation that you can build on and extend for years or decades to come.

On your existing WordPress site

You need to fully audit your existing WordPress site. This isn't just about content, but functionality too. Map out and document everything your site does, both for users and for those that manage it:

• What does your site do? Include plugins that handle things like analytics and interactive theme elements like forms and maps.

• What does your site contain? Document the content on your site, including any custom fields or data stored in plugins. Remember to clearly separate content and presentation: Content is what is topical and consumed by your users (text, images, and video), and the presentation is what frames it (styling, widgets, navigation buttons, etc.).

As you do this, consider how these elements fit together, and how you could break them apart to make them more manageable and composable as separate content types — for example, some of your posts may have recurring elements that are repeated and could be shared across pages from a single source. You should consider your content categories and subcategories as well, as these can be modeled in Contentful to generate your website navigation.

This is also the ideal time to assess your content for future use so that it can be structured appropriately within Contentful. Don't just mimic the WordPress content model and migrate everything 1:1 — this may save time now, but if you take the opportunity to examine your topics and assemblies and refactor your content model, you can set up the future omnichannel use of your content much more effectively.

On your Contentful back end

It's important to get your content model right: While you can (and should) perfect your model over time through iteration, you don't want to paint yourself into a corner by not thoroughly auditing your existing WordPress content during the planning stage. 

Once you have the necessary fields to hold all of your migrated WordPress data in Contentful, you can start moving content and honing its structure. Modeling is a collaborative, creative process, which is why we provide a visual modeler to give you a full picture of your content model as it evolves.

Using a combination of the WordPress REST API and Contentful's Management API , you can then migrate content from WordPress to Contentful much more quickly than manually copying and pasting it over. By converting your content to the structured, channel-agnostic node-based rich text format used by Contentful, it can be made flexible for use in different contexts, rather than being locked in a rigid HTML format.

This process is, in effect, an extract-transfer-load (ETL) pipeline. While this does require some technical knowledge, the process is much easier than it seems. Contentful functions can also assist with this: If your WordPress site relies on external data you can integrate it directly into your content models rather than duplicating it.

You can also set up webhooks in Contentful to notify your CI/CD tools whenever content changes, and trigger automated deployment or browser testing.

On your front end

Your frontend app is where you'll need to load and display your content, and implement the user-facing functionality your WordPress theme and plugins supplied.

Popular frontend development tools for building Contentful-powered blogs, news sites, homepages, and apps include:

• Next.js, Astro, or Remix for building performant React apps (Check out our Next.js Starter!).

• CircleCI and Playwright for automated testing and deployment.

• Postman for building and testing API calls to Contentful using REST or GraphQL.

• Vercel, Cloudflare pages, or AWS for affordable, high-performance hosting.

You can connect your front end to Contentful using our developer-friendly JavaScript SDKs, or using our REST and GraphQL APIs.

Back to your content, and the future

Most migration projects are a race to the finish line to get your shiny new website in front of your users (and your WordPress deployment decommissioned). Once the dust has settled, you should make sure that you're taking full advantage of your new tool chain.

The Contentful App Framework lets you build custom content publication workflows, tailored to your business and optimized for your creatives. You can also browse the Marketplace for prebuilt and pre-approved apps built by the Contentful team and third parties.

Contentful's Live Preview functionality is also a huge benefit during the content creation process: Once implemented by your development teams, your creatives will be able to see exactly how your published content will look across all channels, with no guesswork, and no ugly mistakes in production that only human eyes can catch.

Contentful is composable and extensible by nature. You can add and update fields for new needs, customize your UI, and integrate with other data sources as your requirements change. You can also start thinking about the future: Your website is just one front end, and because you're no longer locked in with the WordPress monolith, you're free to upload your content wherever you want. Start a newsletter, build a mobile app, hoist up a digital billboard.

Now that your content is liberated, what else can you do with it?

Chat with a Contentful expert today to start evolving your web presence

Take full control of your valuable digital properties and realize their full omnichannel value with Contentful. You can get started with your WordPress to Contentful migration immediately — Contentful has thorough, regularly updated docs, and a great community ready to help.

If you've got a big WordPress project and want some more direction, we can put you in contact with a Contentful team member to help you navigate your migration path.

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