Skip to content
Xentium Docs

Switching from WordPress

WordPress is the most widely used way to publish on the web, and if your site is mostly a blog or a business site, it is probably still the right tool. Xentium is worth a look when your site is really a community: members, discussions, moderation, with articles alongside. On WordPress that usually means bbPress, BuddyPress and a stack of plugins on top; on Xentium it’s one platform.

Checked on 15 October 2026. See Xentium compared for the full matrix.

What you gain

Section titled “What you gain”
  • A community platform from the ground up. Profiles, follows and blocks, profile walls, notifications, progression ranks and moderation (reports, warnings, bans, review cases) are part of core, not separate plugins that each work their own way.
  • A forum that belongs to the site. The forum is an official Xentium plugin. It uses the same members, permissions, editor and notifications as your articles.
  • Design without code. Theme Studio changes colours, fonts and every page’s layout in a live preview. Like the WordPress Site Editor, you arrange blocks; unlike a WordPress theme, a Xentium theme is data only and can’t run code on your server.
  • Sign-in built in: passkeys, sign-in links by email, and Google, GitHub and Discord, without a plugin.
  • Fewer moving parts to update. Core and a few official plugins, instead of a long plugin list from many authors.

What you give up

Section titled “What you give up”
  • The ecosystem. WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins and themes: SEO, shops, forms, page builders, newsletters. Xentium has a handful. If your site depends on a particular plugin, check for an equivalent first; usually there isn’t one yet.
  • Shared hosting. WordPress runs almost anywhere. Xentium needs a server with Node.js, PostgreSQL and Redis (a small VPS is enough). There’s no hosted plan.
  • Maturity. WordPress has been in production since 2003. Xentium is an alpha.
  • Your members reset their password once. A WordPress export doesn’t contain password hashes, so we can’t carry passwords over.

What our migration tool moves over

Section titled “What our migration tool moves over”

@xentium/migrate-wp reads a WXR export file (wp-admin → Tools → Export). You don’t need database access or a running WordPress.

Moves over Doesn’t move over
Users, display names, join dates, admins and moderators mapped to Xentium groups Passwords (members reset once)
Categories with their hierarchy Themes, styling and plugins
Blog posts as articles: headings, lists, quotes, code, images and links Pages and every other content type, including bbPress forums (counted in the report)
Tags Media files (we link to them by URL, we don’t download them yet)
Member comments, threaded one level deep Guest comments (comments on Xentium need an account)

Accounts that match an existing Xentium user by email are merged into that user. The migration report lists everything we skipped and why.

How to switch

Section titled “How to switch”
  1. Export your site in WordPress: Tools → Export → All content.
  2. Install Xentium on your server and finish the installer (Installing Xentium on a server).
  3. Do a dry run. It reads, converts and reports, and writes nothing:
    Terminal window
    pnpm --filter @xentium/migrate-wp migrate -- \
      --file my-export.xml --db "postgresql://…" --dry-run
  4. Read the report, then run it for real (the same command without --dry-run). You can watch it under ACP → System → Migration History, and an interrupted run continues where it stopped.
  5. Recreate your pages. Static pages (About, Contact and so on) aren’t imported; rebuild them as articles, and use Xentium’s legal pages for an imprint or privacy policy.
  6. Keep your media reachable. Imported articles link to images on the old site, so leave those files online (or copy them over and adjust the links).
  7. Keep your old links working: add --redirects <folder> to the real run and put the nginx file it writes into your web server. Your permalinks (taken from the export), ?p= links and author pages then go to their new pages.
  8. Tell your members to use “Forgot password” on their first visit.

The full reference is Migrating from another platform.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”