Migration guide

Can you migrate WordPress to Sanity?

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

Yes — moving from WordPress to Sanity is a well-established path for teams that want structured, reusable content rather than page-bound HTML. Sanity models content as schemas written in code, stores rich text as Portable Text (structured JSON) instead of raw HTML, and exposes everything through the GROQ query language and APIs. The trade-off is that Sanity is headless and developer-first: you keep your content but rebuild the front end, and you invest up front in schema design and a migration script. Done well, the result is a cleaner content model that outlives any single front-end framework.

WordPress bundles content, presentation, and behavior into one PHP application: posts and pages live in a MySQL database, layout comes from a theme, and features like SEO, forms, and commerce are bolted on through plugins. Content is stored largely as HTML, with Gutenberg blocks and shortcodes embedded inline, and custom data is frequently attached through Advanced Custom Fields. That coupling makes WordPress fast to launch but hard to reuse content across channels.

Sanity takes the opposite stance. It is a headless content platform where your schema is defined as code, rich text is stored as Portable Text (a structured JSON representation you can render anywhere), and content is served over GROQ and GraphQL APIs with real-time updates. A WordPress-to-Sanity migration is therefore two projects at once: transforming existing HTML content into clean structured documents, and building a new front end (commonly Next.js) against Sanity's APIs.

In your report — not a generic checklist

The WordPress → Sanity 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 Sanity compare across the dimensions that matter for a migration
  • The field-mapping table — what each WordPress construct becomes in Sanity
  • The WordPress to Sanity-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
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Case studies: WordPress to Sanity migrations

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

FAQ

WordPress to Sanity: frequently asked questions

Can I migrate from WordPress to Sanity without losing SEO?

Yes, if you preserve every URL or add 301 redirects, port titles, meta descriptions, and canonical tags into schema fields, and keep your sitemap and structured data intact. SEO plugin data is not exported automatically, so plan to re-model those fields and re-generate metadata in the new front end.

How do I convert WordPress HTML content to Sanity Portable Text?

You run a migration script that parses each post's HTML into Portable Text blocks, typically with a library like @sanity/block-tools or an HTML-to-Portable-Text converter. Custom blocks, embeds, and shortcodes must be mapped to explicit Portable Text object types, and you should validate a sample set before running the full import.

Does Sanity have plugins like WordPress?

Not in the same sense. Sanity has Studio plugins that extend the editing interface, but it does not run front-end plugins the way WordPress does. Functionality such as forms, SEO, and commerce is implemented in your application code or via third-party services rather than dropped in as CMS plugins.

Do I have to rebuild my website when moving to Sanity?

Yes. Sanity is headless and ships no theme layer, so the presentation front end must be built separately, most often with Next.js. Your content migrates into the Content Lake, but templates, routing, and rendering are new work.

Further reading

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

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