Migrating from Craft CMS to WordPress

Introduction

Migrating a website from Craft CMS to WordPress and maintaining the same design involves replicating site settings, content, assets, taxonomy, and navigation menus. Read more to learn about the migration process in detail.

Overall Site Settings

First we migrated the site settings. General contains details such as sitename and logo. Routes is a listing of all redirects. Users also contains passwords and associated roles.

Craft Settings

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WordPress Settings

Content

The first step is to replicate all the custom fields and groupings that have been created in Craft. We used the WordPress Custom Post Type (CPT UI) plugin to create custom fields and groupings. Then we replicated all the fields manually.

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Craft Fields

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WordPress Fields

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The next step is to replicate the actual content. Unfortunately, this is a relatively time-intensive task. We looked at programmatic ways to extract and import data. However, they were more trouble than they were worth.

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Craft Content

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WordPress Content

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Migrating the assets was relatively easy. All we had to do was to copy the folders and import them into WordPress. Of course, the folder structure had to be replicated manually.

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Craft Assets

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WordPress Assets

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Then we migrated all the taxonomy of categories and tags.

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Craft Taxonomy

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WordPress Taxonomy

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Finally we replicated all the navigation menus.

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Craft Menus

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WordPress Menus

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Templates

After the content was migrated, the final step was to rebuild all the templates that power the various pages of the site. Although both Craft and WordPress are PHP powered sites, there was no easy way to reuse the templates. Craft uses a Twig templating engine while WordPress doesn’t. This is a fundamental difference and we had no choice but to rebuild all the templates.

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Craft Template

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WordPress Template

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Other Activities

This post covers only the development-oriented aspects of such a migration. There are a ton of other activities that are involved:

• SEO
• Analytics
• Advertising
• DevOps

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