Migrating a WordPress Blog with Claude Code

With the help of Claude Code, I finished a task that I had pushed aside for years in two days: To move away from WordPress for my blog . 1. Background WordPress had served well between 2016 and 2019, when I was still learning how to write apps with a framework like Ember. Over time, however, the annual cost of $48 (plus $28 for the domain, excluding taxes) felt overpriced, given the lack of features (e.g. no syntax highlighting for *.{gjs,gts} ) and many paywalls for customization. Reposting a blog post on dev.to was also tedious, since I need to write the content on WordPress using a proprietary, interactive editor, while in Markdown on dev.to. I would copy the output text from WordPress, then convert the output to Markdown. I finally had enough when WordPress broke the styles for code blocks again : Once after I had migrated from the classic editor to the current one, and the second time recently while playing with the admin dashboard. 2. Move to Next.js I decided to rebuild my blog in Next.js, a framework suited for blogs and in demand. The app is to be deployed on Netlify, and the domain stays with WordPress through a DNS configuration. I saw the opportunity to use Claude Code for the first time, as I had little experience with Next.js and wanted to see how far I can get with unknown technologies in two days. Thanks to prior experience in blogging on different platforms, I had a good idea of how to store blog content and metadata ( front matter ) in a Markdown file and what users should be able to do when they visit my blog. I also studied the current URLs so that (1) I can tell Claude how to structure the project in Next.js and (2) URLs won't be broken after the migration. What I knew would take the most time and delegated to Claude Code: Create components and routes to provide a similar functionality. Generate Markdown files for blog posts that I didn't repost on dev.to. Many of these were related to math and engineering and included LaTeX in inline and block