The Ghost of PHP and Haunted WordPress Sites
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine What I Built Nothing has died more times on the internet than PHP. At this point, PHP has practically become a ghost. Declared dead countless times, yet somehow still haunting the majority of the web with vulnerabilities like PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619). Even though PHP powers much…
This article recounts the plight of outdated and abandoned WordPress websites, which still haunt the internet despite becoming obsolete. These sites often run on outdated PHP versions, with broken plugins, forgotten themes, and shortcodes from defunct page builders. Consequently, they require constant updates to avoid imminent failure, yet often owners vanish, leaving the sites abandoned.
However, a solution arises in the form of WP2Astro, an open-source plugin powered by Google's Gemma 4. WP2Astro rescues these haunted WordPress sites by converting them into modern, static Astro websites, thereby eliminating PHP runtime and abandoned plugins. It preserves all URLs, posts, pages, categories, tags, and custom post types, ensuring the content's continuity.
Using Gemma 4, WP2Astro not only retains the look and design but also updates the content to Markdown, making the site more efficient and secure. The process is simple: install the WP2Astro plugin, click 'Convert', and the plugin handles the rest. This conversion preserves SEO elements like titles, descriptions, canonical and Open Graph tags, RSS feeds, sitemaps, and robots.txt.
WP2Astro maintains a connection with GitHub, where changes are synced, ensuring the site's continuous evolution. A demonstration of WP2Astro's capability is shown through the 'Ghost Town Gazette', a local news blog from 2009 to 2013. Before conversion, the site was hosted on WordPress; after conversion, it was transformed into an Astro site, retaining its original appearance, links, and structure while eliminating outdated elements.
This results in a static site that remains operational without a PHP server, marking a significant step towards the digital afterlife of abandoned WordPress sites.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
