What happens to my WordPress plugins during migration?

WordPress plugins don’t transfer to Statamic. The two platforms are built differently, and there’s no compatibility layer. So the migration process involves inventorying every plugin you rely on and finding the right equivalent for each one in the Statamic ecosystem.

That sounds like more work than it usually is. Many WordPress plugins exist to solve problems that Statamic handles natively or through its core architecture. SEO metadata management, form builders, basic redirect handling, image manipulation, user roles and permissions — these have either built-in solutions in Statamic or well-maintained addons that cover the same ground. Statamic’s addon ecosystem is smaller than WordPress’s plugin directory, but it’s curated and the quality tends to be higher.

Some common WordPress plugin categories and how they translate:

SEO plugins (Yoast, RankMath): Statamic’s SEO Pro addon covers titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, sitemaps, and structured data. Your existing metadata can be migrated from WordPress as part of the content migration.

Page builders (Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi): These don’t translate. Statamic uses Antlers or Blade templates, and layouts are built in code. If your site was built with a page builder, the design gets rebuilt in templates during migration — which is often an opportunity to clean up years of accumulated layout complexity.

ACF / custom fields: Statamic has its own fieldtypes system (blueprints and fieldsets) that covers everything ACF does. Your field structures can be mapped to Statamic blueprints and your data migrated. See the separate FAQ on ACF and custom field migration.

Contact forms (Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms): Statamic has a Forms addon built in. More complex forms with conditional logic and payment integrations can be handled through Statamic’s native forms or third-party services.

WooCommerce: This is the plugin category that needs the most careful planning. Statamic isn’t an e-commerce platform out of the box. If you have a light use case — a simple product catalog with external checkout — that’s manageable. A full WooCommerce store with inventory management, subscriptions, and complex pricing rules is a different conversation. In some cases, keeping a separate WooCommerce install or migrating to a dedicated e-commerce platform makes more sense.

Caching / performance: Statamic’s flat-file mode eliminates the need for most WordPress caching plugins because there’s no database query to cache — content is compiled and served directly. Performance optimization in Statamic happens at the hosting and CDN layer rather than through plugins.

Security plugins (Wordfence, etc.): Statamic’s flat-file architecture removes most of the attack surface that makes WordPress sites a common target. There’s no public-facing database, no wp-admin path to brute-force, and no plugin update chain to keep secure. Security considerations shift to your hosting environment rather than the application layer.

During a site audit, we map every plugin to a resolution: native Statamic feature, available addon, custom code, or external service. If you’re curious how your current plugin stack would translate, the WordPress site audit is a good starting point.