01The export, sorted
Moves cleanly
Post and page text, headings, structure, publish dates, images as files, your domain.
Changes
The design gets rebuilt once. Editing shifts from browser to commits. Forms re-implement on an endpoint.
Stays behind
Plugins, shortcodes (expanded on export), and anything the database was computing.
02What moves cleanly
03What moves cleanly
New here? Start at the pillar page for the full picture.
Text, headings, structure and publish dates for every post and page. Images, as files. Your domain, which belongs to your registrar regardless of hosting. Comments, if you care about them, export too, though most static sites drop them or use a hosted comment service.
What does not move: the theme, because a WordPress theme is PHP. The plugins, because they are PHP. Shortcodes, which expand to their content during export. Anything the database was computing. Leaving those behind is not the cost of the move, it is the point of it.
04The three decisions that decide whether the move hurts
URLs. Keep the same slugs wherever you can and map the rest with redirects, one page at a time. Get this wrong and every old link lands on a 404, which is the only common way migrations cost rankings.
Images. Export them, re-point the references, click through the site once. Broken images are the loudest and most fixable failure mode.
Search. Titles, descriptions and headings export with the content. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console after the flip. Expect a week of wobble, not a collapse. We have watched small sites move with rankings intact when URLs were respected.
05Who does the work
A coding agent does the rebuild well: show it the old site and the export, and it generates the static version including the SEO basics in the markup. You review the pages, run the conversion checklist, and flip DNS last. If you would rather pay a human, the job is small enough to quote flat.
06Frequently Asked Questions
Will my Google rankings survive?
When URLs are preserved or redirected and the content carries over, yes. Platform changes are routine. The risk cases are dropped content and unredirected URL changes, both of which are choices.
What about registered users and comments?
Users do not carry over; a static site has no login system. Comments export with content but usually get replaced with a hosted comment box or dropped.
Can the new site look exactly like the old one?
Close enough that most people cannot tell, if you insist. Most owners take the move as the moment to modernise rather than pixel-match a design they were leaving anyway.
What if something breaks after the move?
A static site does not break the way WordPress breaks, since there are no updates to conflict. A bad deploy is possible, and deployment history undoes one in seconds.
Build it with your AI. Host it here.
Deploys on every push, from Australia, with nothing to maintain.