Migration guide

Can you migrate WordPress to Contentful?

Last updated: · By the Replatform Radar team — specialists in pre-migration CMS content audits

Yes — migrating from WordPress to Contentful is common and well-documented, but it's two projects at once: moving the content and building a brand-new front end. WordPress is a monolithic PHP app where content and presentation are welded together; Contentful is an API-first headless CMS that ships no front end. Post types and fields map to content types, but the post body (HTML/Gutenberg) must be transformed into Contentful's structured Rich Text, and every plugin behavior is remodeled, rebuilt, or replaced.

WordPress and Contentful sit at opposite ends of the CMS spectrum. WordPress is a monolithic PHP application: one install stores content in MySQL, holds logic in plugins, and renders HTML through a PHP theme. Contentful is API-first — it stores structured content and serves JSON over the Delivery/Management APIs but ships no front end. Migrating is not a like-for-like transfer; it's moving the content and building a new front end (commonly Next.js or Astro) that fetches from Contentful and renders every page — usually the largest single line item in the effort.

The second shift is how the body is stored. In WordPress the post body is a single blob of HTML (classic editor) or serialized Gutenberg block markup, often laced with shortcodes and plugin embeds. Contentful's equivalent is the Rich Text field — not HTML but a structured JSON node tree that can embed references to other entries and assets. You can't hand Contentful an HTML string and have it stored faithfully; the practical path is HTML → Markdown (via turndown) → Rich Text (via @contentful/rich-text-from-markdown), and that two-hop conversion is lossy for anything Markdown can't represent.

Finally, WordPress's plugin layer has no equivalent in Contentful. SEO metadata (Yoast/Rank Math), forms (Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms), custom fields (ACF), page builders, redirects, and dynamic widgets are plugin behaviors that live in WordPress's runtime. Contentful models content, not behavior — so each is remodeled as content-type fields, rebuilt in the front end, or replaced by an external service. There is no 'install a plugin and it works' step on the other side.

In your report — not a generic checklist

The WordPress → Contentful detail, catered to your site

A pre-migration scan produces a report tailored to this exact transfer, covering the parts that decide whether the project goes smoothly:

  • How WordPress and Contentful compare across the dimensions that matter for a migration
  • The field-mapping table — what each WordPress construct becomes in Contentful
  • The WordPress to Contentful-specific gotchas that silently cause data loss, broken links, and ranking drops
  • Realistic timeline & cost drivers for this migration
  • Your own site’s findings scored against all of it
Scan my site for this migration →

Case studies: WordPress to Contentful migrations

Anonymized, real-world lessons from moves like this one — what breaks, what works, and how to protect your traffic.

FAQ

WordPress to Contentful: frequently asked questions

Can you migrate WordPress to Contentful?

Yes. There's no one-click importer, but it's a well-trodden path. You extract content from WordPress (REST API or DB/XML export), transform it to match a Contentful content model, and import it via the Content Management API — open-source scripts (contentful-management + turndown, or custom Python with BeautifulSoup) automate the bulk. Budget for a parallel front-end build, since Contentful ships no website of its own.

How do you move WordPress content to Contentful?

Three phases — extract, transform, import. Pull posts/pages/media/taxonomies from WordPress; design content types and map each WordPress field; then push entries and assets through the Management API. Bodies convert HTML → Markdown (turndown) → Rich Text; images upload as Assets with in-body URLs rewritten. Keep a WordPress-ID → Contentful sys.id map so entry links resolve, and throttle to respect rate limits.

Does WordPress rich text convert cleanly?

Not fully. Contentful Rich Text is structured JSON, not HTML, so conversion is inherently lossy. Prose, headings, lists, links, and images convert well through the Markdown bridge; shortcodes, custom Gutenberg blocks, embeds/iframes, tables, and inline styling frequently break or drop and need custom mapping or manual cleanup. Expect a QA pass on converted bodies.

Will my SEO survive?

It can, but only with deliberate work — SEO is the top migration risk. URLs and asset paths change and plugin-generated meta tags vanish, so preserve URL structure where possible and 301-redirect every changed URL, migrate Yoast/Rank Math titles/descriptions/canonicals into Contentful SEO fields and render them from the front end, reimplement JSON-LD and XML sitemaps, and monitor Search Console after cutover.

Further reading

Before you migrate WordPress to Contentful, know exactly what breaks.

Scan your site →