From WordPress to Astro, with your AI assistant

Croftweaver’s website skills help your AI coding assistant move a WordPress content site to a static Astro site you own. There is no import: you and your assistant rebuild the pages. A helper counts the old site before the move and checks each old address it found after it.

See the move, step by step Is it for you?

Is it for you?

A good fit when

You use WordPress mainly for pages and posts: a business site, a practice, a consultancy, a blog.
Plugin and theme updates take more of your time than the content does.
You, or the person who looks after the site, work with an AI coding assistant such as Claude Code, or are ready to start.

Stay on WordPress when

You run a shop on WooCommerce, or need memberships, accounts or a booking system.
Several colleagues edit the site in the browser and do not use an AI assistant.
A plugin you cannot do without has no counterpart on a static site.
Your WordPress site runs well and costs you little time. Then there is no reason to move.

Why owners leave WordPress

WordPress runs about four in ten websites, and many run well. These are the reasons that come up most often among owners who want to leave, with the figures behind them.

Security updates that never stop. Patchstack counted 11,334 new security flaws across WordPress plugins, themes and core in 2025. Of those, 91% were in plugins, and 46% had no fix yet when they were made public (State of WordPress Security in 2026, updated 25 February 2026). In July 2026 a chain of two flaws in WordPress core itself let an anonymous visitor run code on a standard install with no plugins. It was exploited in the wild and fixed in versions 6.9.5 and 7.0.2 (Rapid7, 17 July 2026, updated 22 July).
Plugins to find, update and keep compatible. In the WordPress project’s own survey for 2023, the most chosen frustration was “too many plugins (finding the right one)”, at 18.6%, up from 8% the year before (Search Engine Journal, 15 February 2024).
Pages that load slowly on phones. In Chrome’s field data for October 2026, 70% of WordPress sites loaded their main content fast enough on phones, against 94% of Wix sites and 95% of Shopify sites. On how quickly pages respond to a tap, WordPress was level with them (The State of Web Vitals, October 2026, the share of sites with a good Largest Contentful Paint).
Page builders that add weight. Builders such as Elementor and Divi make pages easy to lay out, and add their own code to each page. Moving off one usually means rebuilding those pages, whatever the new platform.

Share of all websites: 39.6%, by W3Techs on 18 October 2026.

What changes on a static Astro site

Area	With Croftweaver	The limit
What runs on the server	Plain pages, built ahead of time and served by Cloudflare Pages. No database, no admin login, no plugins running on a server.	A small function of the site’s own runs on each request and counts against the free plan’s 100,000 requests a day. The site also depends on packages from npm, which still need security updates.
Updates	A new site names three packages directly, about 350 with everything they bring along. The launch checklist switches on GitHub’s security alerts for them.	Fewer moving parts, not none. Version updates are not automatic.
Speed	Static pages, with image sizes and formats checked by a test. The three sites measured on 4 October 2026 ranged from 99 to 100 for performance on mobile.	One PageSpeed run per site, shown on the more proof page. No speed test runs on each change; PageSpeed is a check you run.
Design	No page builder. The pages are plain files your assistant edits, with one set of colours, type and spacing.	Pages laid out in a builder are rebuilt, not converted.
Search and AI assistants	Titles, descriptions, structured data and an llms.txt file in place from the first build, kept in place by tests. After launch, an optional weekly check asks four AI assistants whether they name your site.	The weekly check needs paid keys for the assistants. Nothing here promises a ranking or a mention.
Where the site lives	Plain files in your own GitHub repository, under the MIT licence.	You still rely on GitHub, Cloudflare, Astro and your assistant’s maker. Leaving any of them is possible, and takes work.

The speed figures are on the more proof page, and the tests on the checks page.

What stays your job

A lighter site moves some work to you. Plan for these:

The domain, and the GitHub and Cloudflare accounts. Turn on two-factor sign-in for both.
Security updates for the packages, when GitHub reports one.
Your AI assistant’s plan, and checking what it changes before it goes out.
Backups: the repository’s history is one. Keep a copy of the old WordPress site, too, until the move has settled.

The move, step by step

The biggest worry in a move is losing the visitors who arrive through old addresses. These six steps are built around that.

Count the old site

The helper asks the live WordPress site, from outside and without a login, how many posts, pages and other records it holds. It writes each address it finds into a list, and names page builders, form plugins and leftover shortcodes. If its count is incomplete, it says so and names each gap. It reads only, obeys robots.txt and pauses one second between requests; its default of 100 requests covers a site of a few thousand records, and a larger site needs the limit raised.

Say to the assistant: Count what example.com holds before we move it.
Decide what moves

Go through the list with your assistant: keep, merge, or let go. Each form needs a new home. Each page built with a page builder is rebuilt by hand.

Say to the assistant: Go through the inventory with me and mark each address keep, redirect or let go.
Rebuild with the skills

Your assistant builds the new site from the Croftweaver starter: positioning first, then the pages, with the tests running on every change. Copying the text across is part of this step: there is no import.

Say to the assistant: Build the new site and rebuild the service pages from the old ones.
Write the redirects

Every old address that moves gets a permanent redirect in the site’s redirect file. Your assistant writes the lines from the decisions in step 2; no script builds them yet.

Say to the assistant: Write a 301 redirect for each old address we decided to move.
Check each address on the list

Before the switch, the helper asks the new site for each address on the list, the ones the count found and any you add by hand, and sorts them: kept, redirected, missing, or sent to the home page. Missing and sent home are findings, fixed before launch. It also lists temporary redirects that should be permanent.

Say to the assistant: Check each address on the list against the preview.
Launch, then watch

Once the domain’s DNS is on Cloudflare (a guide walks you through moving it by hand), the launch stage connects the domain and checks the live site from outside. Then watch Search Console for addresses Google cannot find.

Say to the assistant: Launch the site on example.com.

The helper is the wordpress-inspector skill, new in Croftweaver 0.32. What it cannot see:

Drafts, private posts and anything behind a login.
Content types the site’s REST API does not list, and fields a plugin keeps to itself.
The media files themselves, redirects set inside WordPress, and form entries.

Those need a backup of the old site or a login. Run it only on a site you own or are asked to look at.

What has been tested so far

apreet.com moved from WordPress to a site built with Croftweaver in June 2026. That move did not use this helper, which first shipped in Croftweaver 0.32 on 16 October 2026. In Croftweaver 0.32 the helper’s two scripts are covered by 87 automated tests, run on every pull request to the toolkit; those tests use stand-in sites.

On 20 October 2026 we pointed the helper at a real WordPress site for the first time: a backup of apreet.com’s old site, restored on a computer with no network, then compared with the live site that replaced it in June.

It found a gap. The old site offered /locations.kml, a file for local search. The new site answers 404. The other nine old addresses still lead somewhere sensible: one is unchanged, seven redirect to the matching page, and one (/home/) goes to the home page, as intended.
It refused to call its own count complete. It counted 9 pages and 54 media files, the same as the old database, and named four content types it could not read. The database held nothing hidden in three of them. The fourth is 14 Elementor building blocks, not pages.

This is one small site. A link to another site, a page dropped on purpose, a temporary redirect and an unreadable address did not occur here. Only tests with stand-in sites cover them.

What a site built with Croftweaver achieves after launch is on the proof page: one site, measured.

Other ways to leave WordPress

An Astro content system with an admin screen. EmDash, open source from Cloudflare and built on Astro, imports from WordPress (Cloudflare’s announcement, and the project’s README, read on 18 October 2026).
A hosted builder. Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and Framer host the site and give you a visual editor, for a monthly fee. The alternatives page compares them.
A static copy of the WordPress site. Cloudflare’s own guide exports one with a WordPress plugin and uploads it; each change means a new export (Cloudflare’s guide, read on 18 October 2026).

Questions and answers

Will I lose my Google rankings?

Nobody can promise that you keep them. What a move can do is keep every address that matters working: the same address on the new site, or a permanent redirect (301) to the page that replaced it. The helper lists the old addresses it finds before the move and checks each of them afterwards, together with any you add to the list by hand, so an address on that list that leads nowhere is found before your visitors find it. Watch Search Console for a few weeks after the switch.

Does Croftweaver import my posts and pages?

No. There is no import today. Your assistant rebuilds the pages from the live site, with you, under the site’s tests. Astro’s own guide for moving from WordPress lists tools that turn a WordPress export into Markdown files, which can save typing on a site with many posts: Migrating from WordPress.

What happens to my contact form, comments and site search?

The contact form becomes one that opens the visitor’s own mail program. Croftweaver builds no form that sends through a server, no comments and no site search. The helper names the form plugins it finds on the old site, so you know what needs a new home before you start.

Who edits the site after the move?

You and your AI assistant: you say what should change, the assistant edits the files, and the tests run before the change goes out. There is no editor in the browser for a colleague who does not use an assistant. An editor screen on your own computer can be added with the keystatic-setup skill.

What does it cost?

Croftweaver is free and open source. Cloudflare’s free plan covers a small site; a busy site can need Workers Paid at $5 a month (Cloudflare’s price, as the setup guide states it). You also pay for your domain and for your AI coding assistant’s plan, which is the main running cost.

Can I keep WordPress as the editor and use Astro only for the pages?

Yes, that is possible: Astro can read content from WordPress, which then runs behind the scenes. Croftweaver does not set this up, and WordPress then still needs its updates.

Should I look at EmDash instead?

If you want a content system with an admin screen and an importer for WordPress, yes. EmDash is Cloudflare’s open-source content system built on Astro (Cloudflare’s announcement). Its README, read on 18 October 2026, describes a full admin panel and imports posts, pages, media and taxonomies from WordPress: EmDash on GitHub. Croftweaver suits you if you would rather keep the site as plain files, change it with your assistant and have tests run on every change.

Quickstart Get Croftweaver on GitHub

The example prompts use example.com. We checked the outside pages and their figures on 18 October 2026; the helper’s trial run above is dated 20 October 2026.