From React to WordPress: A Practical Migration Path

Read the repository before touching the CMS

Start with the routes. A routing table is the closest thing a React application has to a site map, and it tells you which URLs must exist afterwards. Then read the components that those routes render, looking for repetition: three cards with the same shape are a content type, not three pieces of markup.

Props are the second signal. A component that accepts a title, an image, a date and a body is describing a set of fields. Copy those names down; they become your field definitions, and keeping the naming consistent makes the eventual template code easy to follow.

Finally, locate the data source. Content hard-coded in arrays inside the repository migrates into the CMS as real entries. Content fetched from an API may stay where it is, consumed through a template or a small client-side island.

Choose the rendering strategy deliberately

There are three defensible outcomes. Full conversion renders everything in PHP templates: simplest to maintain, best for editorial teams, and it removes the build step entirely. Headless keeps React as the front end and uses WordPress purely as an API: right when the interface is genuinely application-like. Hybrid renders pages server-side and mounts small React islands for the few interactive components that justify it.

Most institutional sites should choose full conversion. The interactivity that seemed to require a framework is usually a menu, a filter and a form, all of which are cheaper to maintain as progressive enhancement than as a build pipeline that someone has to keep alive.

Decide before you start. Rebuilding half a site in templates and then switching to headless is the most expensive path available.

Styles, routes and state

If the project uses utility classes, compile the stylesheet once and enqueue it rather than reproducing classes by hand. If it uses CSS modules or styled components, extract the generated stylesheet from a production build and normalise the class names. Either way, capture the design tokens — spacing scale, type scale, colour palette, radii — because they are what makes the rebuild look identical rather than similar.

Client-side routes become permalinks. Match them exactly, including trailing-slash behaviour, and add redirects for any pattern that cannot be reproduced. Dynamic segments usually become post type slugs or taxonomy archives.

Application state that lived in the browser — filters, sorting, pagination — should be re-expressed in URLs where possible. It is better for sharing, better for crawling and simpler to maintain.

Verification

Compare rendered output rather than source. Screenshot each template at four widths before and after, diff the URL inventory, and confirm that titles, descriptions and structured data survived. Then run performance measurements: a well-built template site should comfortably outperform the original client-rendered application on first load.