WordPress Migration - yibinericxia/documents GitHub Wiki

Introduction

Traditional WordPress

WordPress is a legacy CMS (Content Management System) originally for blogs with the underlying architecture of PHP. With more plugins and templates built by the community, such as subscription form, payment, on-page SEO, etc, now it can be also used for business portfolios, eCommerce, even mobile apps.

Disadvantages

Traditional WordPress is a monolith system which integrates everything tightly. The website is often limited to its themes pre-built with CSS, HTML and Javascript. Performance and scalability are impacted by its monolithic architecture with unscalable plugins. Security is another concern.

Traditional WordPress to Headless WordPress

Headless WordPress

Headless WordPress decouples frontend and backend with the WordPress' REST API, so the frontend could be built in React, VueJS, Angular, etc.

Drawbacks of Headless WordPress

Not all used plugins provide the REST API for the frontend to use.

Migrate to Non-WordPress realm DXP

REST or GraphQL APIs provide better agility, allow to use best of breed stacks, upgrade components promptly and independently.

Modern Headless CMS

The list of modern headless CMS

• Prismic
• Contentful
• Sanity

Migration Steps

• Retrieve original data
• Prepare content data
• Import data

Debugging

Tools

Tools -> Site Health

Frontend

package.json

• Check "homepage" entry

WP REST API

404 on api calls

• Check yourwebsite.com/wp-json/ or yourwebsite.com/index.php?rest_route=/ to see if any json data are returned. If not, check your Settings -> Permalinks to see if it needs to use "Post name" or "Custom Structure".