Migrating a news website w/ 1000s of posts

Using Ghost
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So we at Deceleration.news are exploring moving a small news operation built on Wordpress but hosted by small independent media team. The hope is we would cut down on admin/hosting/updates/design asspects so we can focus more on investigating/writing and delivering the news/analysis our readers actually value. Wondering even if we will be able to migrate a few thousands posts and a dozen pages easily or how much we should expect to leave behind during a potential migration. What are the best resources to start studying this as an options for a small news operation? Others who have done this?

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If you’re planning to host on Ghost Pro, reach out to their concierge team. They do no-charge migrations, and they looooove news publishers.

I hear a lot from new Ghost users who are coming from WP that they love how much easier Ghost is to use, and the reduced admin burden.

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If self hosting, try the Wordpress import in the ghost admin dashboard. I personally had issues with the built in Wordpress import for thousands of posts*. But I did find that using migrate/packages/mg-wp-api at main · TryGhost/migrate · GitHub

Also look into the desired permalink structure.

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Hey @Gharmanity - as @Cathy_Sarisky said drop us a line concierge@ghost.org, happy to chat through this with you if you are looking to move to Ghost(Pro) :smiling_face:

As some up front information, we have migrated sites with 10s of thousands of posts, so quantity is no issue. Where WordPress migrations sometimes become tricky is with custom shortcodes or plugins, so drop me a line above and we can talk through options depending on your current set up.

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Yeah the built in importer has a bit of a limit (around 1000 posts I believe) mainly due to how the authentication token works and the time it takes to process the data. We’re actually working on some improvements that will hopefully let us raise that limit.

Glad to hear the open source CLI tools worked for you - we spend a lot of time using those ourselves in house for larger migrations :+1:

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Will do! Been exploring the site, but also looking for migration stories/case studies.

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Appreciate that. We self-hosted for a number of years, but things got trickier and needed to partner up as we grew last few years.

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Great! Dropping you a note.