Moving a news site off WordPress and Ghost

A news publication needed to move off its legacy platforms. Its content lived in WordPress and Ghost. Readers were mostly on phones, but the experience was built for desktops. Publishing required technical knowledge. There was no security scanning and no automated testing.

What I built

• Content migration: HTML converted to markdown, and images moved from the old CDN to Vercel Blob.
• Mobile-first layouts with bottom navigation and fast loading, inspired by the mobile apps of major news outlets.
• An editorial dashboard with a draft, pending and published workflow, a markdown editor and a media picker.
• Embeds for YouTube, X and Instagram, plus link preview cards.
• Structured metadata, Open Graph tags, a sitemap and canonical URLs to preserve search ranking.
• A migration runbook: pre-migration checklist, content inventory, DNS cutover and validation.

What came of it

The content came across with its formatting intact. Non-technical editors publish through the dashboard. The migrated site started life with more than 350 test files, pre-commit checks, Playwright end-to-end tests and security scans every 12 hours. The runbook makes the process repeatable.