How we migrated this blog from WordPress into Hugo

Thanks to the wordpress-to-hugo-exporter tool linked in the Hugo documentations and this guide it was possible to easily convert the files from our old WordPress instance into .md files + media files carefully organized in folders and subfolders compatible with the Hugo static site generator.

We moved the .md files from hugo-export.zip into /content/posts/ and the media files into /statics/posts_img/, adding the new required html templates layouts/posts/list.html and layouts/post/li.html.

For some reason the exporter tool didn’t do everything pitch perfect (maybe neither were our posts in WordPress):

• the exported .md files had mixed LF / CR+LF line endings that we fixed with fromdos

• some dates in the front matter was corrupted, luckily they were correct in the filename

• several indentations in the <pre> elements and <ul> / <ol> did not come out well

• links to videos were missing.

Additionally we:

• updated all media paths to match the new /posts_img/... urls

• fixed several Html Validator errors

• added in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/wp.example.com.conf this snippet:

  server {
    location ~ / {
      if ($args ~* "p=xxx") { rewrite .* https://example.com/posts/yyyy-mm-dd-filename/? redirect; }
      ...
    }
  

  to avoid link rot.

Not as smooth as we hoped but doable!