I reached the point where WordPress’s bulk was no longer worth it. Its plugin and theme ecosystem is unmatched, but the downside is obvious: it slows the site down badly. I had recently moved to a dedicated server and it still didn’t solve the problem, so I gave up on WordPress.
Z-Blog was next on my list. The official site didn’t offer a migration path—apparently I would have had to go through ASP first and then to PHP, which was too much hassle. I found someone to do the conversion and offered to pay for the work. He quoted 300 yuan. For this little bit of data? No.
Then I considered Emlog. Again, no official migration tool. The community-made tool left too much cleanup: comments disappeared, and every attachment turned into a post. That was the end of that idea.
Typecho ended up being the one. It has an official plugin, and I followed the tutorial step by step. Half an hour later, posts, categories, comments, and attachments had all come over. It was about as close to perfect as a migration gets. I also like the theme. Unless I mention it, most visitors probably can’t tell the CMS changed—they’d just notice the site loads faster.
A couple of things weren’t perfect. Comment notification emails were a problem; there was a plugin for it, but it didn’t seem to work. Still, the flaws don’t outweigh the benefits. Fast page loads are what really matter.
Update, October 19, 19:40: Comment email notifications are now working. The theme is close to perfect.