Migrating from WordPress to Movable Type — A Practical Guide Worth Documenting Precisely Because It Runs 'the Other Way'

Search for “CMS migration” and you’ll mostly find articles about moving from Movable Type to WordPress. In practice, however, migrating in the reverse direction — from WordPress to Movable Type (or MovableType.net) — is sometimes a genuinely rational choice. Because so little is written about this reverse direction, this article brings together the reasoning behind the decision and the practical migration steps.

“We have a WordPress site, but we only update it a few times a month. Even so, we’re constantly chasing update notifications for the core software and plugins” — this is a familiar situation for small and medium-sized businesses and professional-services firms.

When a site’s purpose is attracting inquiries and building trust, and updates mostly consist of announcements and columns, what such a site needs from a CMS isn’t extensibility — it’s being low-maintenance and hard to break. This article walks through the considerations for deciding whether to migrate from WordPress to Movable Type, and the actual migration steps.

1. The short answer first

• Migrating from WordPress to Movable Type is technically well established. MovableType.net’s import feature supports WordPress-format export files (XML). It imports not just posts and pages, but also images and files referenced from the body text and custom fields.
• Migration makes sense for sites with low update frequency, few people updating content, and fixed extensibility requirements. It is not a good fit for sites built around dynamic membership features or e-commerce implemented via WordPress plugins.
• What determines whether a migration succeeds is not the feature differences between CMSs, but URL design, 301 redirects, and how you plan to replace plugin functionality. If you move the data without deciding these things up front, you’ll run into trouble both for SEO and for day-to-day operations.
• Custom post types and heavily customized XML may not import cleanly as-is, so budget time for conversion and manual adjustment (this is also explicitly noted in the official manual).

2. Why does migration happen in the “reverse” direction?

WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world, and it’s a fine choice in its own right. At the same time, being a dynamic CMS comes with an operational burden.

• Update work never stops. Updates to the core, themes, and plugins occur continuously, and leaving them unattended is itself a risk. IPA (Japan’s Information-technology Promotion Agency) has repeatedly issued warnings about CMS and plugin vulnerabilities, with plugin-related issues standing out in particular.
• Nobody ends up owning it. It’s not unusual for a site to have been delivered by a web agency with no ongoing maintenance contract, leaving a site where “nobody has ever clicked the update button.”
• Plugin compatibility problems. In setups where every update breaks the layout or disables a feature, updating itself becomes something to fear — which only accelerates neglect.

Movable Type is a CMS built around static publishing: it generates HTML in advance and serves it as-is (dynamic publishing is also available if needed). If the pages returned to visitors are static files, no CMS program needs to run on the public-facing side, which reduces both the attack surface and the points of failure.

Choosing the SaaS offering, MovableType.net, goes a step further: the service provider handles core software updates and security, and SSL (HTTPS) is included at no extra cost. It’s a good fit for an organization that wants to keep investing in the site’s content without wanting to deal with CMS upkeep.

3. Migration destinations — Movable Type vs. MovableType.net

There are broadly two migration destinations.

For a corporate or professional-services site run by a small team, it’s realistic to start by evaluating MovableType.net, and only consider the software version if requirements exceed what it offers. The approval workflow (request/approval) and staging features pair well with the way professional-services firms often operate — for example, “publish only after the office head has reviewed it.”

4. Overview of the migration process

Migration proceeds in the following order. The key point is to place the URL inventory (step 2) before data migration (step 3).

1. Current-state inventory — list pages, features, and plugins
2. URL design — finalize the old-to-new URL mapping (301 mapping)
3. Data migration — WordPress export → import
4. Template rebuild — implement design and metadata
5. Feature replacement — forms, search, and so on
6. Verification — compare old vs. new, measure redirects
7. Go-live — DNS cutover, sitemap submission, Search Console check

5. The practicalities of content migration

On the WordPress side, use the admin screen’s export feature to produce XML (WXR format). On the MovableType.net side, load this file from the import tool screen. According to the official manual, the scope of what’s imported is as follows:

If you rely heavily on WordPress custom post types or custom fields, refer to the official conversion tool and walkthrough and sort each content type into “migrates automatically,” “needs conversion,” or “needs to be rebuilt by hand.” This breakdown effectively becomes your migration estimate.

Note that for sites with a large number of articles or a complex structure, an official migration support desk is also available. For migrating to the software version of Movable Type, an official Q&A is published as well.

6. Carrying over URLs and SEO

Most of the causes behind a CMS migration hurting SEO performance have nothing to do with the type of CMS — they come down to how URLs are handled.

WordPress permalink settings (/?p=123, /2024/05/post-name/, /category/post-name/, and so on) usually won’t match the URL structure after migration. Carry things over using the following steps:

1. Inventory every URL. List all live URLs — posts, pages, categories, tags, and image pages — using a sitemap or a crawling tool.
2. Finalize the mapping to new URLs. Decide on the post-migration URL rules first, then build an old-URL-to-new-URL mapping table (301 mapping). Check pages with high search traffic first.
3. Set up 301 redirects. Apply permanent redirects (301) to any URL that changes.
4. Carry over on-page elements. Titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, and structured data should be deliberately carried over during the template rebuild. Elements previously output by SEO plugins get replaced with template-based implementations after migration.
5. Verify after launch. Resubmit the XML sitemap, monitor indexing and errors in Search Console, and measure redirects on key pages (checking status codes).

This principle — “URL design first, data migration and design later” — applies to site renewals in general, not just CMS migrations. In our own site renewal case study, the very first thing we did wasn’t design — it was a URL inventory.

7. Replacing plugin functionality — separating “find a replacement” from “no longer needed”

When migrating away from WordPress, the plugin list can look like a source of anxiety. But if you sort things out feature by feature, most of them fall into one of three categories:

The contact form in particular is the lifeline of a lead-generation site. Incidents where notification emails silently stop arriving after a migration are a real thing, so always send an actual test submission before going live. We’ve written up how to investigate undelivered form emails in “How to Investigate When Contact Form Emails Aren’t Delivered.”

8. What kind of site is this a good fit for? — Professional-services and small-team corporate sites

To summarize, here’s the profile of a site for which migrating from WordPress to Movable Type (MovableType.net in particular) tends to be a good fit:

• Updates are mostly announcements, columns, and case studies, and the update work is fairly routine
• There’s no dedicated web staff, and nobody can spare the time to maintain the CMS itself
• Like sites for accountants, judicial scriveners, and other professional-services firms, you want a review/approval step before anything goes live
• The site has no dynamic features such as membership systems, e-commerce, or booking (or those can be split out to an external service)
• The business is one where a security incident directly becomes a trust problem, and you want to reduce the attack surface

Conversely, if you’re planning to keep actively extending the site with plugins, or if dynamic functionality is core to the site, staying on WordPress (and building out a proper maintenance structure) is the more sensible choice. Migration isn’t the goal in itself — it’s a tool for balancing your operational capacity against the site’s requirements.

If you’d like to think this through in terms of overall site structure and cost, see also “Website Development Costs for Small and Medium Businesses” and “Service Page Structure for Technical B2B.”

For those considering a CMS migration

If you’re struggling with the maintenance burden of WordPress, you don’t need to decide on a migration right away. The safe starting point is simply to inventory your current site’s pages, features, and plugins, and work out what would change if you migrated — what becomes unnecessary, and what needs to be rebuilt.

KomuraSoft LLC offers website development services that include CMS migration, as well as technical consulting to help sort out migration strategy. If you’d like to start with an inventory of your current site, please get in touch via our contact page.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about the topic of this article.

Can WordPress articles be moved to Movable Type as-is?

Basic content such as posts and pages can be migrated. MovableType.net's import feature supports WordPress-format export files (XML), and it also picks up images and files referenced from the article body and custom fields. That said, custom post types and heavily customized data may not load as-is, and may need conversion or manual adjustment. Before migrating, it's important to sort out which content relies on WordPress's standard features and which depends on plugins or customization.

Does migrating CMSs hurt SEO rankings?

What matters isn't the type of CMS itself, but whether the URLs change and whether redirects are set up correctly. Before migrating, build an inventory of every URL, finalize the mapping to the new URLs, and set up 301 redirects for any URL that changes. If you carry over the title, meta description, and heading structure, and after launch resubmit your XML sitemap and check Search Console, you can avoid any major drop caused by the migration itself. Skip this work, on the other hand, and you'll lose rankings regardless of which CMS you choose.

What happens to functionality that was handled by WordPress plugins?

Since the plugin mechanism itself can't be carried over, you decide on a replacement feature by feature. Contact forms get rebuilt using the destination platform's form feature or an external form service; the meta information that SEO plugins used to output gets implemented in the template; related posts and breadcrumbs are also built into the template. On the other hand, security and backup plugins often become unnecessary entirely in a static-publishing/SaaS setup — the role itself disappears. The key is to separate 'features that need a replacement' from 'features that simply become unnecessary.'

Should I choose Movable Type or MovableType.net?

If you manage your own server and want the freedom to extend the site with plugins and database integrations, the software version of Movable Type is the right fit. If you'd rather hand off server management and core software updates to lighten the operational load, the SaaS offering, MovableType.net, is the better fit. For organizations without a dedicated web staff member — such as small and medium-sized corporate sites or professional-services sites — it's realistic to start by evaluating MovableType.net, since it lets the service handle core updates and security.

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Go Komura

Representative of KomuraSoft LLC

Focused on Windows software development, technical consulting, and investigations into failures that are difficult to reproduce.