Website Migration Horror Stories: 7 Failures and What They Teach
Only 1 in 10 website migrations improve SEO rankings — most lose ground. These are documented failures, and the specific mistakes behind each one.
#WordPress Alternatives
56 posts
Looking for more on WordPress Alternatives? This collection on the Emdash Kits blog brings together related articles, guides, and insights. Browse all 56 posts below.
WordPress Multisite to a Modern CMS: Migration Strategies
Multisite migrations aren't one migration — they're several, sharing a database. Here's how to plan a move without breaking every site on the network at once.
WooCommerce Content Migration: Products, Categories, and Reviews
WooCommerce stores products across half a dozen interlinked database tables. Here's what actually needs to move, and where migrations usually break.
How to Clean Up a WordPress Database Before Migrating
A bloated WordPress database makes exports slower, backups bigger, and migrations more likely to time out. Here's what to purge before you move anything.
Keeping WordPress as a Backend vs Migrating Completely: Trade-offs
Decoupling WordPress with the REST API keeps your editors happy but doesn't fix the security or performance problems a real migration solves. Here's how to decide.
DIY vs Professional WordPress Migration: Cost and Risk Compared
A simple migration costs a weekend; a botched one costs a year of rankings. An honest framework for deciding when to migrate WordPress yourself and when paying a professional is the cheaper option.
WordPress Plugin Equivalents: What Replaces What After You Migrate
The surprise of leaving WordPress isn't finding replacements for 20 plugins — it's discovering most of them don't need one. A plugin-by-plugin map of what becomes a feature, a service, or nothing.
Migrating from Elementor or Divi: Escaping Page Builder Lock-In
Page builders promise design freedom and quietly take content hostage: your pages live as builder-specific markup that no other tool can read. How the lock-in works and the realistic ways out.
How to Redirect Old WordPress URLs After a Migration (301 Map Guide)
The redirect map is where migrations are won or lost. How to inventory every WordPress URL — including the weird ones — map them one-to-one, and verify the 301s actually work.
What Happens to Your SEO When You Migrate Off WordPress?
Rankings don't belong to your CMS — they belong to your URLs, content, and signals. What actually transfers in a migration, what's genuinely at risk, and the realistic timeline for both.
WordPress Security Problems (and Why Headless Architectures Avoid Them)
Over 11,000 new vulnerabilities hit the WordPress ecosystem in a year — 91% of them from plugins. A clear-eyed look at why WordPress security is structurally hard, and what headless does differently.
The Real Cost of Running WordPress: Hosting, Plugins, and Maintenance
The software is free; the total cost of ownership isn't. A line-item breakdown of what a WordPress business site actually costs per year — including the invoices nobody budgets for.
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