Goodbye WordPress. Hello Astro!

1. Back That Thang Up

🎶 Cash Money Records, taking over for the ‘99 into 2000…

• Insurance policy (required) - Export your content from your WordPress Dashboard Tools > Export. This spits out an .xml file.
• Insurance policy (optional) - If you have the luxury of WordPress dedicated hosting such as WP Engine, they have an automated backup feature. Download the latest zip file, just in case!

🎶 …(nah, nah, nah, nah, nah)…After you back it up, then stop…

2. Return of the Mack

🎶 Ooh-oh-oh, come on…Hey, yeah, ay…Well, I tried to tell you so (yes, I did)…But I guess you didn’t know…

• It’s time to come back from nothing. In this case, with wordpress-export-to-markdown to convert your WordPress contents to Markdown for consumption later down the road within your Astro theme.
• Take your xml file and rename it to export.xml per Will’s suggestion and make life easier for yourself. Drop it like it’s hot into the same directory that you run the script from.

	npm install && node index.js

After running the command, the Node app should output a similar report of what’s saved.

🎶 …You lied to me…All this pain you said I’d never feel…You lied to me…But I do…But I do, do, do…

3. Not Like Us

🎶 Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop…I’ma do my stuff…

182 posts.

Irrespective of volume, this is the next stop as we move the ball down field and depending on how old your posts are, special care is required.

• Take the contents of /output directory of wordpress-export-to-markdown and drag that over into your Astro theme’s /blog directory.

Drag contents of the output directory (e.g. post) into your theme’s blog directory.

⚠️ DISCLAIMER: Take your time. It’s at this point where beauty is in the eye of the beholder (aka YOU). In my case, that’s 182 posts (I didn’t even talk about pages) circa 2013 onward. I needed to see how the old stuff drew to the screen before publishing. I had to double-check each article to ensure that the markdown and display was in an acceptable format (fixing broken iframes, centering things again, etc.). Also, not every piece of data is exported to markdown. Most noticeably Yoast SEO contents. It also meant getting scrappy with Photoshop again to make featured images because honestly, that wasn’t always a thing many many moons ago.

🎶 …Are you my friend?…Are we locked in?…Then step this way, step that way…Then step this way, step that way…

4. Hypnotize

🎶 …Uh, uh (uh, come on)…Ha, sicker than your average, Poppa twist cabbage off instinct…Brothers don’t think stuff stink…Pink gators, my Detroit players…Timbs for my hooligans in Brooklyn (that’s right)…

I’m not messing around with 182 posts, period. Time to redirect!

• If you have a few redirects, insights from Kedasha’s URL Redirects is perfect.
• Otherwise, I went with Cassidy’s setup using Netlify Redirects with Astro guided by List all URLs.

🎶 …Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can’t you see?…Sometimes your words just hypnotize me…

5. The Next Episode

🎶 …La-da-da-da-da…It’s the motherlovin’ D-O-double-G (Snoop Dogg)…La-da-da-da-da…You know I’m mobbin’ with the D-R-E…Yeah, yeah, yeah…You know who’s back up in this motherlover…

• This is arguably the most stressful part. No matter who controls your DNS setup, they all clap back with the “up to 24 hours” disclaimer for DNS propagation. In my case, Delegate to Netlify was the route to take.

🎶 …💨🌱 every day…