WordPress exports a standard format called WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) precisely so you can leave. When I moved a site to a Go CMS that supports WXR import, the migration turned out far easier than I expected. Here is what the process looks like.

What the WXR import handles

A WordPress export bundles posts, pages, categories, tags, comments, and authors into one XML file. A CMS with WXR import reads that file and recreates the structure:

  • Posts and pages with their content, slugs, and dates
  • Categories and tags with their relationships
  • Comments, including approval state
  • Author references

In my case, the content, structure, and comments came across with almost no manual work. The WXR format does what it was designed to do.

What still needed manual attention

  • Theme. The new CMS has its own templates; the old site's look does not come along. Budget time for the design.
  • Media files. Exports reference media URLs; you still have to transfer the actual image files and re-map the URLs.
  • Plugins. Anything a plugin did — galleries, custom post types, embeds — has to be re-created in the new platform.
  • SEO. Rebuild the sitemap, redirects for changed URLs, and re-verify in Search Console.

The surprises that made it easy

  1. The dates survived. WXR carries pubDate, so published dates came over correctly — no "everything says today" problem.
  2. A single binary replaced a LAMP stack. After migration, deployment became copying one file instead of maintaining PHP, Apache, and MySQL.
  3. Content ownership changed. Posts became plain data in a file-backed database, versioned and backed up trivially.

The moral: migrating away from WordPress is not scary when the target speaks WXR. The hard part is never the data — it is the theme and the plugins, which you should plan to redo anyway.