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I currently have a (very large, over 1000 pages) hobby site. For the past 20-plus years, I’ve maintained this site by building the individual pages and inserting them into the site.

It takes a fair amount of time to update this site, which happens every two months. Part of what makes it time-consuming is that I also have to set up the navigation (which is easier than it seems; I’m still using FrontPage (shaddap, you!) with a third-party design-time navigation component).

I’d like to convert the site to something like WordPress, where I can just insert the (formatted/tagged) text, and have it come out looking nice.

  1. Is WordPress in fact the best target for this conversion, or are there others that are as good or better? For each suggested target, what are the requirements that would be needed on my host (and where can I find out more)?

  2. In any case, is there anything out there where I could just “feed” it my current site, and have it inserted into the new system automagically? This doesn’t have to be part of the suggestion for (1); it can be a separate program.

One-time payments for a license aren’t objectionable; annual licensing may be.

Switching hosts is a last resort (so I’m not particularly interested in hosting the site at e.g., wordpress.com). I can, within very broad limits, manage my site virtually any way I want with my current host.

Ideally, I’d like to just dump in MarkDown/CommonMark/GFM, possibly mixed with HTML+CSS. I should also be able to add keywords/hashtags and have automatic "TOC" pages, as more-or-less equivalent of the current sections.

Easy-but-moderated feedback, with notifications to me by email, would be nice, but not essential.

I don’t have a problem with URLs for individual articles changing (obviously), but the links to the magazine issue TOCs have to stay the same; I’ve promised my readers that they’re permanent.

So far, everything I've found on the web assumes that I'm starting from scratch, and generally weighs in in favor of Wordpress, Drupal, and/or Joomla!. None of what I can find, though, seems to offer any sort of reasonable way to convert an existing static site, especially not one of this size.

Current Site: Freelance Traveller

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  • You don't have to be afraid of switching hosts, you can just install WordPress on your own site. BTW Your first question is a matter of opinion, I would edit it out. Wordpress is so versatile that it is a good choice. Your links to the magazine issue TOCs will be difficult to satisfy, but I think you can always modify your htaccess file to redirect the old links to the new WP ones.
    – user416
    Commented Feb 13, 2018 at 16:20
  • @JanDoggen - it may be badly worded, but I am interested in alternatives; I don't necessarily accept the opinion that WordPress is the be-all and end-all - if there are alternatives that people know of, and are comparable in capability, I'd like to know about them. On the other hand, if WP really is, in terms of ease-of-setup/available capabilities/etc., head and shoulders above any competition, I'd like to hear that, too.
    – Jeff Zeitlin
    Commented Feb 13, 2018 at 16:25

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There are tools that can help:

The HTML 2 Articles Joomla paid extension is designed to import HTML files into Joomla.

The HTML Import 2 WordPress free plugin imports static HTML files into WordPress.

As per the comment from Jan Doggen, you may need to redirect old urls to new urls via .htaccess, the Joomla Redirect component or similar.

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