Moving a website to Astro can improve performance and simplify maintenance. But a successful migration involves more than rebuilding the homepage in .astro files. You also need to preserve URLs, content, metadata, forms, analytics, integrations, and the publishing workflow.
Use this as a working checklist. Copy it into your project issue, assign an owner to each phase, and do not approve the launch while a critical item remains unchecked.
Migration rule: The new site is ready only when it preserves the old site's valuable content, discoverability, and business functions not when it merely looks the same.
Confirm Astro suits the website. It is an excellent fit for marketing sites, blogs, documentation, landing pages, and other content-led websites.
List dynamic pages and interactive islands. Search, filters, calculators, and account widgets may need runtime code; most content does not.
Choose the content model. Decide between Markdown/MDX, Astro content collections, a headless CMS, or the existing CMS used headlessly.
Confirm the editorial workflow. Make sure non-technical editors can create, preview, update, and publish content after migration.
If you are still deciding whether the migration is justified, this Astro vs WordPress comparison explains the trade-offs around performance, plugins, ownership, and editing.
Crawl the complete website. Use the sitemap and a crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
Export landing pages from Google Search Console and analytics. These sources can reveal important URLs missing from the sitemap.
Identify pages with traffic, conversions, or backlinks. Mark them as priority URLs for manual QA.
Inventory page templates. Include articles, listings, services, author pages, contact pages, archives, and error pages.
Inventory platform features. Record forms, search, comments, memberships, e-commerce, multilingual content, redirects, and scheduled publishing.
Audit third-party scripts. Include analytics, consent tools, chat widgets, schedulers, and advertising pixels.
Create a complete backup. Preserve the database, media, metadata, forms, redirects, DNS records, and deployment settings.
Choose static or on-demand rendering for each route type. Use Astro's static output by default unless a page genuinely needs request-time data.
Select the hosting platform and Astro adapter. Confirm runtime, environment-variable, image-processing, and redirect support.
Define content schemas. Validate titles, descriptions, dates, slugs, canonical URLs, images, and draft states during the build.