Leaving WordPress: four paths, and which one fits your site

WordPress migration paths compared

The four WordPress exit paths differ most in what stops working, not in price: every one of them costs between $3 and $7 a month on InstaPods.

Which kind of WordPress site do you have?

The question that decides your WordPress exit is what the site does when a visitor arrives, not how big it is. Four checks settle it.

1. Does anything take input? Contact forms, comments, search, logins, a cart. If yes, a static snapshot breaks it.
2. Who edits it, and how often? Weekly edits by someone who does not use git rule out Astro and the snapshot, and point to EmDash or WordPress.
3. Which plugins put something on the page? SEO and caching plugins do not count. WooCommerce, a membership, course or booking plugin does, and any one of them means stay on WordPress.
4. How big is it? The snapshot importer saves 25 pages by default and up to 100 per import, within 40 MB and a 45-second crawl. A bigger site needs EmDash, Astro, or a plugin like Simply Static.

Static snapshot: your WordPress site as plain HTML for $3/mo

A static snapshot copies the HTML your WordPress site sends to visitors, plus its same-domain images, CSS, JavaScript and fonts, and serves that from a pod with no PHP and no database.

Pages are served at their original paths, so /about/ is still /about/. Links between pages keep those addresses, and titles, meta descriptions and canonical tags stay as WordPress wrote them. Import from the home page and robots.txt comes across unchanged, with a sitemap of the saved pages written at the address it lists, so the sitemap you submitted to Google keeps resolving. The RSS feed is not copied. What does not come across: anything that runs on the server (forms, search, comments, logins, the admin), pages behind a login or that nothing links to, and content that JavaScript builds after the page loads.

In exchange there is nothing left to patch: no plugin updates, no PHP upgrades, no login page for bots to hammer. The trade-off against Simply Static, the popular plugin that does this from inside WordPress, is covered in WordPress to static site.

EmDash: a WordPress-style admin without PHP

EmDash is an open-source CMS built on Astro that describes itself as the spiritual successor to WordPress: an admin panel, a media library, sandboxed plugins and passkey sign-in, written in TypeScript.

EmDash imports from a WordPress export file (Tools → Export) or through its EmDash Exporter plugin. Posts, pages, custom post types, categories, tags and authors come across; media is downloaded from your live site and re-linked. The plugin route also brings comments, menus and SEO fields from Yoast or Rank Math. WordPress plugins and themes do not come across, and the importer does not map your old permalinks, though EmDash has a Redirects page in its admin for doing that by hand.

On InstaPods EmDash is a 1-Click app on the $7/mo Build plan, running on Node and SQLite with no Cloudflare account. Build is the floor because EmDash rebuilds the site in place when it updates, and that build peaks near 2 GB of memory. The full walkthrough, including redirects and moving your sign-in to your own domain, is WordPress to EmDash, step by step.

Astro: your WordPress blog as Markdown in git

Astro is the right WordPress exit for a developer who wants posts as Markdown files in a repository, built into static HTML, with no admin and nothing running at request time.

Our free WordPress to Astro converter does the conversion in one step: paste your site's address and it reads the public REST API, then builds an Astro project with every post and page as Markdown, your same-domain images downloaded, and each converted post at the URL it has today. Only plain ?p=123 links and the old feed and sitemap addresses get 301 redirects. The preview is free with no account; download the project or deploy it on a $3/mo pod. The full walkthrough, including what breaks and how to keep editing, is WordPress to Astro, step by step.

Astro's own WordPress guide lays out the manual route instead: start from the blog template, export your posts with wordpress-export-to-markdown, and expect to tidy the result. The other option it lists is keeping WordPress as a headless CMS and building only the front end in Astro. Astro hosting compared covers the places an Astro site can live.

When to stay on WordPress

Stay on WordPress when a plugin does work your visitors see: a store, a membership area, a course, bookings, or a form builder that stores entries.

None of the three paths above carries a WordPress plugin across. EmDash has its own plugin system with a far smaller catalogue, Astro has no runtime plugins at all, and a snapshot has no server. Rebuilding WooCommerce is not a migration, it is a new project.

If what you want to leave is the hosting bill or the host, keep WordPress and move it. A $7/mo InstaPods Build pod runs WordPress on the PHP preset, with a managed MySQL database added as a service (Build plan and up), SSL and daily backups; best VPS for WordPress covers sizing and the alternatives. If you would rather not manage WordPress at all, InstaWP is a managed WordPress platform and a sister product from the team behind InstaPods, so weigh that suggestion accordingly.