Why We Moved Away from WordPress
While WordPress has served the web for decades, modern web applications often hit friction points around plugin bloat, sluggish database schemas, and security patch overhead. By migrating to Laravel 12, we unlock native Eloquent ORM performance, structured data schemas, and modern Blade/Tailwind frontend rendering.
The Migration Pipeline
Our migration engine processes legacy data in discrete, deterministic stages:
- Taxonomy Mapping: Categories and tags are ingested while preserving parent-child hierarchy.
- Content Transformation: Gutenberg comment blocks (<!-- wp:... -->) and legacy shortcodes are parsed into clean HTML.
- Media Optimization: Embedded images are ingested into Laravel storage with WebP compression.
- SEO 301 Permanent Redirects: Historical permalink patterns (e.g. /%year%/%month%/%slug%/) are automatically mapped to maintain zero link rot.
Zero downtime and zero broken links were our non-negotiable requirements during the migration.
Key Takeaways
The result is a sub-50ms TTFB response time, zero dependency conflicts, and a joy to develop with using Laravel 12 and Vite.
