How I Converted My Wordpress Blog to Pelican, A Checklist
Recently there has been a lot of noise online about the Wordpress website platform. This blog is formerly a Wordpress blog, so I am able to share from personal experience how I moved this blog. I began writing the early years of this blog on the Wordpress free plan, followed by a few years as a paying customer of Automattic, the corporate entity associated with Wordpress.org. The notes below are from my experience moving to a Python Pelican blog.
Here is the checklist I wrote down when I made than transition:
- Export posts to XML.
- Export all media.
- Convert posts to new blog format: Markdown or reStructuredText Format
- Set DNS redirect from old blog to new blog.
- Update old blog with notice of new blog.
- Set posts to private/public and set search engine + "third party" AI training settings.
- Update urls from old domain to new domain.
Install the Pelican, lxml, beautiful soup and feedparser Python libraries.
pip install pelican
pip install BeautifulSoup4
pip install lxml
pip install feedparser
1. Export posts to XML.
Go into the Wordpress settings and export posts. I selected XML format.
2. Export all media.
Wordpress allowed me to choose to export posts or media, so I exported all the images on my blog also.
3. Convert posts to new blog format: Markdown or reStructuredText Format.
Pelican's import tool for wordpress converts your XML file to either .md or .rst files based on which CLI argument you pass.
Use the pelican-importer CLI to convert the XML to Markdown or reStructuredText.
I chose to use the default detting of the CLI to export to .rst. If you want to specify a folder to drop the contents, use the -o argument. Use the -m argument to specify which output format.
1 2 3 4 | # Convert XML to reStructuredText Format files with default settings. pelican-import --wpfile example.wordpress.2023-05-14.000.xml # Convert XML to Markdown files and specify the output directory and format. pelican-import --wpfile example.wordpress.2023-05-14.000.xml -o ~/projects/example.com/content/blog -m MARKDOWN |
pelican-importer documentation
4. Set DNS redirect from old blog to new blog.
I previously hosted my blog on a custom .com domain. When I stopped paying for the domain, my domain reverted back to example.wordpress.com. However, you can pay a domain register a small fee to forward traffic to your new domain. You can transfer old domain to services like Namecheap or Cloudflare to set up a redirect. It's recommended to keep a redirect for at least 1 or 2 years after moving to a new domain to catch any evergreen backlinked traffic.
5. Update old blog with notice of new blog.
Keep A Few Posts Exclusively on the Old Blog
The benefit of Worpdress's free plan is that you can still keep some posts and the original sub-domain live on their free plan.
Write your final post on the old blog to let subscribers know you've moved.
I had built up a list of subscribing Wordpress users after 6 years writing on the platform. Write a brief post explaining where to find future blog posts to let your audience know where to find you. In my case, I wrote a goodbye post on my old blog, and an announcement post about on my new blog domain.
Update the Site Tagline on Your Old Blog
I also set the old blog's tagline to point readers to new blog. In Wordpress Settings / General, you can edit the site tagline:
6. Set posts to private/public and set search engine + "third party" AI training settings.
Once I got the hang of Pelican, I reviewed each converted post to fix links, grammar or formatting errors from the conversion. I slowly moved my converted posts over in batches of 2 or 3 posts at a time. As I moved the posts to the new blog, I chose to set the old posts individually to private within the Wordpress editing CMS, rather than at the sitewide level. By setting posts to private, they're also still accessible to your Wordpress subscribers by direct url link. Setting individual posts to private allows subscribers who are following legacy links to have a chance to find my new home on the web. For non-subscribers, the private links will break, however they will still see an error page on your old blog. From there, they might see the site tagline directing to the new blog or find a few of the posts I reserved exclusively for the legacy blog.
One benefit of Wordpress from an SEO perspective is that they have search engine indexing control in the settings panel. In the settings, you have the ability to tell search engines whether or not you should index your blog. I set my old Wordpress site settings to "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" and "Prevent third-party sharing for example.wordpress.com". The third party sharing setting prevents Wordpress from using your posts to train their AI models.
7. Update urls from old domain to new domain.
It's common practice to add a "CTA" or call to action at the end of a blog post. For me, that tends to be the related posts I've written in the past. Any links that contain the old domain need to be swapped to the new one.
For validating urls in my 100+ past posts, I also wrote a python script to help find broken links and .rst tags here: rst-url-validator Github Repo
Moving From Wordpress Was Easy With Pelican
I did thorough research into Python static site generators before choosing Pelican. The benefits of Pelican include a Wordpress import CLI that makes it easy to quickly compile an an alternative MVP to move your blog from Wordpress. Pelican is an obvious choice for static site generation in the Python ecosystem. After 17 months of using it, I can safely say I'm happy with the decision!
Supplementary Reading
Deploy a Hugo website to Cloudflare
How to Convert a Wordpress blog to an Astro Static Site
Launching a Live Static Site Blog via Pelican, Github and Cloudflare Pages