Research brief: The Candid Creative WordPress Migration Playbook (piece 19)
Created 2026-05-22
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]]. - 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-migration-recovery-timeline]]. - Productize the playbook as a fixed-price Migration Audit ($1,250). See
[[rule-lead-with-paid-migration-audit]].
Hidden killers, content-extraction decision tree, cutover patterns, and objection handling are all catalogued — see [[migration-hidden-killers-catalogue]], [[content-extraction-decision-tree]], [[cutover-pattern-low-risk-same-domain]], [[migration-objection-handling-map]].
Depends on
- reference Search Engine Journal (Jan 2025): 523-day average recovery from domain migration (n=892); 17% never recover by 1,000 days
- reference Low-risk cutover pattern for same-domain CMS migration — 2-week pre-flight, DNS TTL 300s, monitor 48h, keep WP firewalled 30 days
- rule RULE: Lead WordPress migration sales with a $1,250 fixed-price Migration Audit. Quote the build fixed-price only after the audit completes.
- reference Migration hidden-killers catalogue — the seven failure modes that appear in every post-mortem
- reference Content extraction decision tree — WP REST API default, WXR XML fallback, direct DB only for hidden postmeta
- reference Migration objection-handling map — sourced answers to every common client fear about migrating off WordPress