My experience migrating from WordPress to Hygraph

As the Chief Product Officer of Hygraph, I've long championed the power of structured content. But nothing proves a belief like putting it into practice. That's exactly what I did when I migrated my personal project - the B2B Product Playbook website - from WordPress to Hygraph. This wasn't just a tech upgrade; it was a fundamental shift in how content should be managed for scalability, performance, and maintainability.

Why I made the switch

When I first launched my site, WordPress seemed like the obvious choice. However, as my content grew to 50,000+ words across 500+ entries, managing it in WordPress became an uphill battle. Here's why:

• Fragile infrastructure: Over time, WordPress became increasingly unstable. Plugin updates would break functionality, formatting inconsistencies crept in, and security vulnerabilities became a constant concern.
• Opinionated content model: My playbook consists of diverse content types - chapters, tools, books, and articles‚Äîthat needed clear relationships. WordPress, built on an outdated post/page structure, struggled to accommodate this complexity.
• Scaling challenges: Managing content updates and ensuring consistency became harder. What should have been simple edits often turned into a troubleshooting nightmare.

In WordPress, the default content types are blog posts and pages. If you want to publish other types of content—like product pages, use cases, or team profiles—you usually have to create them as static pages manually, one by one.

How I migrated from WordPress to Hygraph

To turn this vision into reality, I took a structured, step-by-step approach:

Day 1: Content architecture. I mapped out my Hygraph schema: identifying core models, reusable pieces, and leveraging features like references and components. This was all based on deep product knowledge - no AI needed 😉.

Day 2: Core website structure. I began with Cursor using a massive prompt, which quickly became a disaster 💣. I restarted, gradually building the header, footer, and main page first, then navigation and individual pages with placeholder content. When working in an iterative manner, AI prompting made the site feel real even without complete content.

Day 3: Connecting to Hygraph. Hygraph's API-first design was perfect for this project. Using our internal API Playground to refine GraphQL queries, I integrated them into my code. Seeing content from Hygraph live on the site was a true goosebump moment 🚀.

Days 4-5: Refinement & expansion. With the ''happy path'' working, I extended the app for a richer digital experience - adding advanced media components (like carousels), ensuring component reuse (like a standard ''Further Reading'' section), and fine-tuning styling (e.g., for external links). Sometimes AI led me astray, and I had to revert to an earlier stable state, but overall, progress was rapid.

🤩 By the end of 5 days, the core structure was live - including the initial chapter, several book reviews, and additional resources. Then came the real work: migrating the rest of the content. This was not a technical challenge but a content modeling effort to ensure a clean and scalable structure.

Structuring the schema around my website architecture

Migrating to Hygraph wasn't just about fixing WordPress headaches - it was about having the content model that fits my information architecture. Here's what changed:

1️⃣ Clear, Reusable Components

Instead of treating content as static pages, I could define content models - a structured way of managing different content types with clear attributes and relationships. This meant that every entry, from a book recommendation to a video resource, became a structured entity that could be referenced dynamically.

This approach isn't just about organization - it directly impacts efficiency. Instead of duplicating information across pages, I can now define relationships between content. For example, a tool entry for "User Story Mapping" can reference related tools like "Journey Mapping" or books that explain the methodology. Any update to these entities automatically reflects everywhere they are referenced.

2️⃣ Performance & Stability

Gone were the days of worrying about bloated plugins, caching issues, and unreliable formatting. The new site, built with Hygraph and deployed via Vercel, consistently scores 100/100 on Google PageSpeed while offering a rock-solid backend free from unnecessary overhead. Since the content is fully API-driven, frontend performance is optimized, and I don't have to deal with slow database queries or heavy rendering engines.

3️⃣ Future-Proof Scalability

With structured content, my site is now ready for growth. Adding new chapters or expanding the playbook is as simple as creating new entries - no more restructuring pages or battling unpredictable UI shifts. Whether I want to extend my content model with additional metadata, introduce translations, or experiment with new ways of surfacing information, Hygraph provides the flexibility to do so without breaking existing content.

A Product Mindset: Thinking Backwards

🛠 Thinking backwards is key.

If you can't envision how your content will be used, your schema can become a dead end. I'm not talking about visual layouts - I'm focused on the target user persona and how they consume content. For my site, which is structured like a textbook enriched with links and references, this was crucial.

💡 A breakthrough: In Hygraph, content components map 1:1 to frontend components. For example:

• In a frontend framework like React, Vue, or Svelte, a LibraryItem component displays a book, video, or online article.
• In Hygraph, a LibraryItem component holds the structured data for those resources.
• Nesting works the same way in both - making content relationships developer-friendly and ensuring a consistent UI for readers.

This product mindset - treating content models like features on a product roadmap - made all the difference. By starting with the goal in mind and designing backwards, I avoided the pitfalls of an inflexible schema and built a system that will scale over time.

Final Thoughts

This migration reaffirmed what I already knew: structured content isn't just a technical improvement - it's a strategic advantage. It enables cleaner workflows, easier content management, and long-term scalability without constant firefighting.

With Hygraph, I built a future-proof site that's faster, more organized, and fully flexible for future growth. If you're still managing content as static pages or wrestling with traditional CMS limitations, it might be time to rethink your approach.

Have you embraced structured content? Let’s discuss! 🚀