Working with Static Sites

Chapter 8. Migrating to a Static Site

Brian Rinaldi

By  this point, we hope that you are thoroughly convinced that creating a static site with one of the many available static site generators is a worthwhile and viable option. Perhaps you are even thinking that it would be the perfect option for an existing CMS site you already maintain, but you’re concerned about the complexity of moving all of the site’s content to static files.

The good news is that there are lot of solutions for this problem. Although the migration may still be quite a bit of work depending on the size and complexity of your existing site, these migration tools can massively decrease the effort and difficulty.

Of course, all of this depends on two factors: what CMS engine you are coming from and what static site generator you intend to use. Most of the major static site generators have tools to import content from various CMSes, but they don’t cover every available option, and some static site generators have many more available importers than others.

Because a lot of factors are involved in this sort of project, in this chapter I’ll offer an overview of what might be involved, how some of these importers work, and what available options are out there. We’ll cover the static site generators used in this book as well as some others that offer migration options. Let’s start off by examining one common scenario.

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