This is where we publish what we learned moving real sites off WordPress - page counts, crawl behaviour, redirect maps, Core Web Vitals before and after, and the mistakes that cost us time. Everything here is from work we actually did, not hypotheticals.
Latest
Migrating 528,315 WordPress Pages to Hugo - What We Learned
A half-million-page WordPress install moved to Hugo without losing rankings. Template strategy, the CLS traps, the shell commands that fall over at that scale, and the per-site checklist we now run before launch.
Also worth reading: the same migration written up as a case study, with the business numbers rather than the engineering detail.
Why we publish the failures
Every migration vendor shows you a before-and-after Lighthouse score. Almost nobody tells you which plugin silently ate their redirect map, or that a 500,000-page crawl needs a different template strategy than a 50-page brochure site.
We write the second kind. It's more useful if you're the one who has to do the work, and it's more honest about what the work actually is.
What we write about
- Migrations at scale - what changes past ~10,000 pages
- Keeping rankings through a platform change: redirects, canonicals, hreflang
- Core Web Vitals on static output, including the CLS mistakes we made
- Security: why removing the PHP runtime removes whole vulnerability classes - see php2shell
- The unglamorous parts: file ownership, crawl budget, sitemap hygiene
Frequently asked questions
Are these real migrations?
Yes. Every write-up here is work we did on a site that was live before and after. Where a client isn't named, the numbers are still theirs.
How often do you publish?
When there's something worth writing up. We'd rather post one useful teardown than a weekly post that says nothing.
Can I ask about my own site?
Run the free scan first - it tells you your PHP version, whether WordPress is still live, and what the migration surface looks like. That's a better starting point than a generic question.
See what your own site would take
Free scan, 60 seconds, no login. Your PHP version, whether wp-login is exposed, and what a static migration would involve.
Scan my site free