Clunky WordPress to Blazing Next.js: Migrated Without Losing SEO

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Hi Vercel Community,

I wanted to share my recent journey migrating an existing WordPress site to a fully custom Next.js app on Vercel—and how I preserved all my SEO juice in the process.

:construction: The Problem: Slow, Plugin-Heavy WordPress

  • My original site ran on a traditional WP + page-builder setup.
  • Over time it got bloated with plugins, the editor became sluggish, and making UI tweaks felt risky.
  • I knew I needed a faster, more flexible solution—but I couldn’t afford to lose Google ranking or rewrite all my blog URLs.

Discovering Vercel v0 + Next.js

  • I experimented with Vercel’s v0 framework (Next.js 13 App Router) to see how quickly I could prototype.
  • Within hours I had a clean, responsive layout—zero CSS frameworks, thanks to Tailwind integration out of the box.
  • Local dev → commit → instant preview on Vercel: game-changer for my workflow.

Keeping WordPress as a Headless CMS

  • Rather than rip out WP entirely, I left it running at content.appeq.ai.
  • I consume the REST API (and GraphQL) from my Next.js pages—so all blog posts, slugs, and metadata stay in the same database.
  • No messy redirects or URL changes: /my-post-slug on WP now serves directly at www.appeq.ai/my-post-slug.

Zero SEO Impact, Better Performance

  • My sitemap.xml and robots.txt now live under Next.js, pointing only at the new URLs.
  • Internal links, Open Graph tags, and canonical URLs all updated automatically in the metadata export.
  • Web vitals are rock-solid, and I saw no dip (in fact, a slight bump) in Google search impressions.

Check It Out

Head over to https://www.appeq.ai/ for a live demo of the new site—complete with headless-WP-powered blog, dynamic content previews, and my custom Tailwind components.

Thanks to the Vercel team for making this possible!

-Mano

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@support-5658 The new site looks great!

Since the old website is still up, did you set up redirects or canonical URLs so that Google doesn’t penalize you for duplicate content? That’s about the only concern I can think of.

Great job! :smiley:

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Thanks. Yes. took care of that with the canonical url - for now pointing to the old website. Keeping fingers crossed that I don’t see any drop.

So far so good.

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