Migrating 10 WordPress Sites to Cloudflare Pages: What Broke

A few months ago I moved a batch of WordPress sites off a shared LAMP host and onto Cloudflare Pages as static exports. The pitch is obvious: no PHP process to keep patched, no MySQL to babysit, effectively free hosting, and a CDN in front of everything by default. What the pitch doesn't tell you is how many small, boring things break on the way there. This post is a rundown of what actually went wrong migrating a set of ten WordPress sites — one of them is burningtribe.tokyo , which I'll use as the concrete example — and how I fixed each issue. The approach The migration itself is conceptually simple: crawl the live WordPress site, save every URL as a static HTML file plus its assets, and serve that tree from Cloudflare Pages. I used a combination of wget --mirror and a custom crawler for a couple of sites where wget choked on query-string-based pagination. The static output then gets pushed with wrangler pages deploy . No build step, no framework, just files. That simplicity is exactly why it seemed low-risk. It was not. Problem 1: relative canonical tags pointed everything at the homepage The first thing I noticed after deploying was that Google Search Console started reporting most inner pages as "duplicate, Google chose different canonical" — and the canonical it picked was the homepage. The cause was almost funny once I found it: the WordPress theme emitted <link rel="canonical" href="/"> as a relative path in a few cached page fragments, instead of an absolute URL like https://burningtribe.tokyo/some-post/ . On the original WordPress install this didn't matter because the page itself resolved the relative reference correctly at the point of caching. Once the HTML was frozen and served statically from a different origin structure (Pages serves everything from the apex), that relative canonical collapsed to the site root for every single page that had it. The fix was a straightforward but tedious pass: grep every exported HTML file for rel="canonical" , and rew