I migrated my 13-year WordPress blog to Payload CMS

I've used WordPress to manage my website since the very beginning in 2014. It worked great, was super flexible, and I learned a lot of skills from it

I started to get bored of WordPress after many years and wanted to manage my site content in a different way. This is when I started to learn about a "headless CMS". That means that the system where you write the content and the website where you display it are totally separate.

I decided to make the move from my self-hosted WordPress to a headless CMS called Payload CMS.

The goal of this Wordpress to Payload CRM transition was to keep all URLs the same and have everything be as seamless as possible.

I won't get too much into the actual steps I did to make this transition, but in summary:

• I Installed Payload CMS onto my new server and created "collections" for posts, pages, quizzes, media, comments, tags, products, etc. AI was helpful create the config files.
• Then, I used WordPress' export feature to download all my content into an XML file.
• I used AI tools to write a script that parsed then imported my 200 posts into Payload. Any failed imports I manually created (around 50)
• I used AI tools to replace all elements in the Payload Website Template with neobrutalism.dev components.
• Tested all my top pages and features and used AI tools to fix any bugs I found.
• The final step was launch the live website and update the becausebirds.com domain to point at the new server address.

I plan to keep an eye on the site analytics over the new few weeks to make sure I didn't miss anything!