You are thinking about moving off WordPress and onto Astro. What you want to know is what breaks, and whether you lose your place in Google.
What happens to your Google rankings
Your place in Google is attached to your page addresses, not to WordPress. Same words at the same addresses, and Google has nothing new to learn.
Some addresses will change anyway. Write the list before anyone touches the export button: every old address, and the new one it points to. Pull every address out of your sitemap file, then check your busiest 20 pages by hand.
We will not promise your rankings hold. After any move, traffic can move around for a few weeks, and nobody can prove what caused it. Anyone who promises otherwise is guessing.
What the WordPress export button actually gives you
You get one file of text. WordPress’s own instructions for the export screen (wordpress.org/documentation/article/tools-export-screen/, updated June 2024) list what is in it: posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users.
Your pictures and your site settings are not in it. The README for WordPress’s command line export tool, wp-cli/export-command on GitHub, says the same. You get the addresses of the pictures, not the pictures.
The screen has filters: all content, posts only, pages only, or by category, author, date or status. Pick the wrong one and the export looks finished with half your site missing. Count your posts and pages before, then after.
A big site comes out as several files, since the command line version splits at 15 MB by default.
The export is your words. Everything else here is a rebuild.
What happens to your pictures and media library
WordPress cuts several copies of every upload. Its own developer documentation works one through: a 1500 by 706 full size, a 768 wide copy, a 500, a 300, and a 150 by 150 thumbnail. Your theme adds more.
Uploads sit in dated folders like wp-content/uploads/2018/06, so every picture address inside every page has to be rewritten.
Astro’s migration guide points at a tool called wordpress-export-to-markdown. It downloads the attached uploads and the pictures inside your posts, pausing so downloads do not time out. On the new site, pictures are resized once when the site is built, before a visitor arrives.
Pictures that only a plugin or a slider knew about often do not come across. Someone has to open every page and look.
What a page builder layout turns into
Switch the builder off and the design does not follow. WordPress core’s reference for do_shortcode says that with no shortcode tags defined, the content comes back without filtering, and warns the shortcode can then show in the content when plugins are disabled. In owner terms: visitors see bracket codes where your layout used to be.
Plenty of sites are built this way: Elementor alone reports more than 10 million active installs in the WordPress plugin directory.
Newer content is not clean either. Block content carries comment markers such as wp:paragraph, with the settings held inside them (WordPress block editor documentation). Those get stripped or converted.
The words survive. The layout gets built again by hand. That is the slow part of a move, not the export.
There is no wp-admin any more
Astro’s own migration guide is blunt. It sets WordPress’s dashboard against needing a code editor and a development environment. There is no comparable plugin market, so you build many of your existing features yourself. The same guide warns against converting a large or complicated WordPress site.
Free editors put a plain edit screen back on top of the files. Decap CMS is MIT licensed, free today and staying free by its own account, with your content in your own repository. You bring the login and backend. Pages CMS is free to use online, and you can deploy it or self-host it, with no database.
The trade in one sentence: a simpler site to run, and no more click-anywhere editor.
What gets harder after the move
- Forms. A finished file cannot take a form submission. Astro’s documentation says a page has to be rendered on demand to handle a form action. So a form needs something behind it: a small piece of code running on Cloudflare, or a hosted form service. That is how our builds do it.
- Comments. The moderation apparatus goes with WordPress: the hold-for-approval queue, the blocklist, closing comments after so many days (WordPress discussion settings documentation). Disqus’s free plan is ads-supported and requires a top ad placement on your site. Paid plans start at $12 a month for 100,000 pageviews (Disqus’s pricing page, updated April 2025). giscus has no ads and costs nothing, but commenters need GitHub accounts, so nobody on a local trade site comments.
- Site search. Pagefind is the usual replacement for the built-in search. Its documentation says a 10,000 page site can be searched with a total network payload under 300kB, often nearer 100kB.
- Plugins. If a plugin ran your store, your memberships or your bookings, it has to be replaced, and some have no plain replacement.
If you run WooCommerce, this move is probably not for you.
Who keeps the site running once WordPress is gone
The upkeep goes with the software. Bill Erickson, a developer, wrote that keeping his WordPress site live meant managed hosting, plugin updates, backups, security patches and an admin backend he rarely used.
The crew comes with every tier. Stablehand writes page changes and fixes what breaks. You approve every change before it goes live, and Steward writes it to the log (the agents). You still do not edit the code yourself, and we do not pretend you will.
The pricing page lists all three tiers, what each includes, and the extras that stay separate.