Research brief: The Candid Creative WordPress Migration Playbook (piece 19)

Status: Research material + productization plan — not a finished article. Compiled May 22, 2026.

TL;DR

• For most small-business WordPress sites with a blog (10-200 pages), the right target stack is Astro for content-driven brochure+blog sites and Next.js 15 only when authenticated app behavior is required — paired with CMS workflow decision matrix — Sanity/Storyblok (weekly editors, visual preview); Keystatic (monthly, technical-adjacent); Markdown-in-Git (engineers only).
• The "523 days to recover / 17% never recover" stat (see [[sej-892-migrations-523-day-recovery]]) is scoped to domain-to-domain migrations, not same-domain CMS swaps. Same-domain recovery is weeks, not months. See Same-domain CMS migration with proper 1:1 redirects: 2-4 weeks of crawl turbulence; 4-8 weeks to full stability. The 523-day stat is domain-to-domain..
• Productize the playbook as a fixed-price Migration Audit ($1,250). See RULE: Lead WordPress migration sales with a $1,250 fixed-price Migration Audit. Quote the build fixed-price only after the audit completes..

Hidden killers, content-extraction decision tree, cutover patterns, and objection handling are all catalogued — see Migration hidden-killers catalogue — the seven failure modes that appear in every post-mortem, Content extraction decision tree — WP REST API default, WXR XML fallback, direct DB only for hidden postmeta, Low-risk cutover pattern for same-domain CMS migration — 2-week pre-flight, DNS TTL 300s, monitor 48h, keep WP firewalled 30 days, Migration objection-handling map — sourced answers to every common client fear about migrating off WordPress.