90% less migration time with an automated web content extractor

Established websites on legacy WordPress, Joomla, and custom PHP often need to move onto modern platforms like Astro and Next. js, and every page of titles, body copy, images, and meta tags has to arrive intact on the new build.

On larger sites of 500 pages or more, recreating that existing content by hand is slow and ties up the team that should be focused on the new platform. Manual moves also risk small slips: a missed page, a broken image path, a flattened heading, or an internal link still pointing at an old URL.

The goal was to capture every page accurately and free the team to build, rather than retype what already existed.

Engineered a Python-based content extractor that crawls a full website from its sitemap and follows internal links to find orphaned pages. Extracted structured content for every page, including titles, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, body HTML, images, and the internal link graph.

Built smart HTML parsing that preserves formatting while stripping legacy template wrappers, with concurrent fetching and rate limiting to respect server load. Serialised the output to clean JSON and Markdown and downloaded images locally, ready to import straight into a new CMS.

Processed more than 1000 pages on a recent migration with full content capture and preserved page hierarchy.