The latest articles on DEV Community by Aidan (Donghyuk) Lee (@__b1d78f37ba92b503dab3). https://dev.to/__b1d78f37ba92b503dab3 https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4212140%2Fff608a74-b916-4466-a3dc-7639e25c923c.png https://dev.to/__b1d78f37ba92b503dab3 en Aidan (Donghyuk) Lee Wed, 28 Oct 2026 05:02:37 +0000 https://dev.to/__b1d78f37ba92b503dab3/i-built-a-wordpress-migration-tool-that-checks-its-own-work-2i5p https://dev.to/__b1d78f37ba92b503dab3/i-built-a-wordpress-migration-tool-that-checks-its-own-work-2i5p <p>Most WordPress migration tools end the same way: <em>export finished</em>. Finished is not the same as complete. Did every post make it? Every image? Does every old link still land somewhere?</p> <h2> What breaks when people leave WordPress </h2> <p>Before writing code, I collected 300 GitHub issues from four popular WordPress export tools and sorted them by title:</p> <ul> <li>27% were the tool itself crashing, timing out, or failing to install</li> <li>14% were about images</li> <li>12% were about URLs and permalinks</li> <li>10% were about HTML turning into broken Markdown</li> </ul> <p>I also read 639 Hacker News comments from 21 threads about leaving WordPress. 111 of them describe a concrete difficulty. The most common were build and deploy work afterwards, losing comments, getting content out, and non-developers losing the ability to edit.</p> <h2> What wp-move does </h2> <ol> <li>Reads posts, pages, media, categories and tags through the REST API. It only reads.</li> <li>Converts each post to Markdown with front matter. Anything Markdown can't hold (tables, embeds, forms) stays as HTML and is listed.</li> <li>Downloads images hosted on your site and rewrites their paths.</li> <li>Maps every old URL to its new path and writes <code>_redirects</code> and nginx files.</li> <li>Writes <code>report.html</code> and <code>report.json</code>, and exits with code 2 if posts, media, image references or internal links are missing. </li> </ol> <div class="highlight js-code-highlight"> <pre class="highlight shell"><code>uvx <span class="nt">--from</span> git+https://github.com/AidanKR/wp-move@v0.0.1 wp-move pull https://your-site.example <span class="nt">--out</span> out </code></pre> </div> <h2> Results on the demo site </h2> <p>On a local WordPress 7.1.3 with the official theme test data:</p> <ul> <li>144/144 posts and pages, including a draft and a scheduled post</li> <li>37/37 media originals</li> <li>0 pages under 95% of their words, 0 missing images, 0 broken internal links</li> <li>164/164 old URLs redirect to the new path through nginx (282/282 with <code>--url-style slug</code>)</li> </ul> <p>Then I broke it on purpose: I deleted one image and one post from a copy. The report showed 143/144, 36/37, and 3 missing image references, and the command exited with code 2.</p> <h2> What it does not do yet </h2> <ul> <li>It has been tested only on the theme test data, not on real production sites.</li> <li> <code>_redirects</code> has not been tested on Netlify or Cloudflare Pages yet.</li> <li>No comment migration, no category or tag pages, no theme. Shortcodes are detected but not converted.</li> </ul> <p>If you own a WordPress site, try it and open an issue with what the report got wrong (leave out anything private).</p> <p>GitHub (MIT): <a href="https://github.com/AidanKR/wp-move" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://github.com/AidanKR/wp-move</a><br> Demo video (6.5 min): <a href="https://youtu.be/-IhrdRSFLl8" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://youtu.be/-IhrdRSFLl8</a></p> <p><em>Disclosure: this post was drafted by an AI agent (Claude) that also helped build the tool. Every number above comes from measured runs documented in the repository README.</em></p> wordpress python opensource webdev