Elementor and Divi migration checklist
What to catalogue before rebuilding a page-builder site outside WordPress.
Page builders hide important behavior inside widgets, shortcodes and global settings. A reliable migration makes those dependencies visible.
Catalogue templates and globals
Record headers, footers, archive templates, global colors, fonts, reusable blocks and responsive overrides. Identify forms, popups, sliders and third-party embeds separately.
Extract content carefully
Separate reusable content from presentation markup. Preserve image descriptions, link destinations and semantic heading structure instead of copying generated HTML blindly.
Build an acceptance list
Test each page family across breakpoints, then verify forms, analytics, redirects and metadata. The goal is equivalent business capability—not identical technical output.
Find what the builder is hiding
Elementor and Divi sites often store meaning inside layout modules, templates and shortcodes. Inventory global headers and footers, theme-builder templates, reusable sections, popups, forms, custom CSS, dynamic fields and third-party widgets. Check whether essential copy disappears when a plugin is disabled; that is a dependency the migration must translate, not copy blindly.
Group pages by family
Do not estimate effort from the raw page count. Fifty articles may share one template while five service pages contain five unique layouts. Build representative examples for each family, approve them, then migrate the repeated content. This exposes content-model problems early and avoids polishing dozens of pages on the wrong foundation.
- Export form destinations and confirmation behaviour.
- Record mobile-only overrides and hidden sections.
- Locate inline styles, scripts and tracking snippets.
- Test old shortcodes inside posts and widgets.
Define editorial acceptance
The new site is not complete when it visually resembles the old one. Editors must be able to update recurring content without breaking layout, previews must reflect production, and every migrated page family needs a checklist for headings, media, links, metadata and calls to action.