How do you migrate WordPress posts to Next.js?

Export your WordPress content as XML, then use a Node.js script to parse the XML with xml2js and convert each post to an MDX file with YAML frontmatter. HTML content is converted to Markdown, and comments are embedded as static arrays in the frontmatter.

How do you handle WordPress images after migration?

Download your wp-content/uploads directory via SFTP, upload the images to Cloudflare R2 using rclone, then find-and-replace the old WordPress image URLs in your MDX files with the new R2 CDN paths.

Is Next.js better than WordPress for a portfolio site?

For a developer who works with React and TypeScript daily, Next.js eliminates the PHP context switch, gives full control over performance with no plugin bloat, and lets you use the same tools professionally and personally. The tradeoff is losing the WordPress admin UI — content is managed as MDX files in a Git repo.

Migrating from WordPress to Next.js

To migrate a WordPress site to Next.js, you export your content as XML, convert posts to MDX files using a Node.js script, upload images to a CDN like Cloudflare R2, and deploy the Next.js app to a VPS or hosting platform. The entire process took about 2 weeks of evening work for a site with 22 archived posts, 147 comments, and over 300 images.

After ten years on WordPress hosted at GoDaddy, I finally made the jump. This site is now running on Next.js 15, deployed on a Hetzner CPX21 VPS at $9.99/month, with images served through Cloudflare R2's free egress tier. Here's what I learned.

Why leave WordPress?

WordPress served me well for a long time. But as a developer working with Next.js professionally at Pantone across 10 multilingual sites, maintaining a PHP site on the side felt increasingly like unnecessary context switching. I wanted three things:

A codebase I actually enjoy working in — TypeScript, React components, Tailwind CSS
Full control over performance — no plugin bloat, no database queries for static content
A learning project — setting up my own VPS, nginx, SSL, and CI/CD pipeline from scratch

What does the new architecture look like?

The stack is deliberately simple. Next.js 15 with App Router handles routing and rendering. MDX files in a /content directory replace the WordPress database — no CMS, no admin panel. Tailwind CSS with a custom design system replaces the theme layer. next-intl provides internationalization across 6 languages. Cloudflare R2 hosts all images with zero egress costs. A Hetzner VPS running nginx and PM2 serves the app, with GitHub Actions deploying on every push to main.

Total infrastructure cost: $9.99/month for the VPS. Everything else is free tier.

How did the content migration work?

The Bonnie Café motorcycle blog had 22 posts with hundreds of images and 147 comments across all posts. The migration involved 4 steps:

Exported WordPress XML via Tools → Export (took about 30 seconds)
Wrote a 288-line Node.js script to parse the XML with xml2js, converting each post to MDX with frontmatter including title, date, slug, category, excerpt, and comments as a YAML array
Downloaded the 1.2GB wp-content/uploads directory via SFTP and uploaded to R2 using rclone sync (about 8 minutes)
Ran a find-and-replace across all MDX files to swap WordPress image URLs to R2 paths

The comments render as static display-only cards at the bottom of each post. No new comments — the blog is archived. This eliminated the need for a database entirely.

What would I do differently?

If I were starting over, I'd set up the R2 bucket and image pipeline before writing any code. Migrating images after the fact meant URL replacement work across 22 files that could have been avoided with the right paths from day one.

I'd also look at Contentlayer or Velite instead of hand-rolling the MDX compilation. Parsing frontmatter manually with gray-matter works, but those tools give you type-safe content with zero configuration.

What are the results?

The site loads in under 800ms on a cold start. Lighthouse scores: 98 Performance, 100 Accessibility, 100 Best Practices, 100 SEO. Build time is 12 seconds. Deploy-on-push means a change goes live in about 45 seconds from commit to production.

Total migration time was roughly 40 hours spread across 2 weeks of evenings and weekends. Worth every hour.