A slow WordPress site, rebuilt on Next.js - organic traffic up around 120%

The challenge

A professional-skills training institute - with a broad catalog of technical and digital upskilling programs and a busy content operation - had outgrown its website. The site ran on WordPress, and after years of themes, plugins and add-ons it had become slow. On a site this content- and catalog-heavy, that weight showed up everywhere: sluggish page loads, weak Core Web Vitals, and a mobile experience that made prospective learners wait before they ever saw a course.

For a business that lives on search and enrolments, slow pages are not a cosmetic problem - they are a growth problem. Page speed feeds directly into how Google ranks a page and into how many visitors stay long enough to enquire, so every extra second of load time on a course page works against both rankings and leads.

Scaling the site was just as painful. Reaching learners in different cities meant either one generic page trying to rank everywhere, or a sprawl of thin, near-duplicate pages that search engines quietly discount. And publishing anything new - a course update, a blog post, a landing page - meant going through developers and a cluttered admin, so the marketing team moved at the speed of the dev queue.

What we built

• Rebuilt the entire front end on Next.js and statically generated the pages, so they render as fast, pre-built HTML instead of being assembled on every request. The result is the opposite of the plugin-heavy stack it replaced: quick to load, stable under traffic, and fully crawlable for search.
• Moved the blog and editorial content onto Sanity, a headless CMS, so the marketing team writes and publishes on its own - no developer in the loop, and no more waiting on the dev queue to ship a post or a fresh landing page.
• Rebuilt the full course catalog as a fast, filterable experience, so a prospective learner can narrow a large program list down to exactly what they want in a couple of clicks.
• Designed the per-city course pages as one templated architecture rather than hand-built duplicates: a single program generates genuinely distinct, locally-relevant landing pages for 8+ cities, which lets the site rank for 'course in [city]' searches without tipping into the thin-content territory Google penalises.
• Placed demo-class and enquiry funnels through the journey, so the intent that a fast, well-ranked page creates actually converts into leads instead of leaking away.
• Handled the WordPress-to-Next.js migration carefully - carrying the existing content across so the rebuild built on the site's existing search footing rather than resetting it. That is the difference between a rebuild that grows traffic and one that loses it.
• Engineered speed and SEO in from the first line: right-sized, optimised images, clean semantic markup and structured metadata - so the performance and search gains are part of the architecture, not bolted on afterwards.
• Rebuilt the supporting modules the institute runs on - events, mentors, a jobs board, certificate validation and a structured FAQ - as part of one coherent, maintainable codebase instead of a stack of plugins.

Why it worked

Rebuilds make people nervous for a good reason: a careless migration can wipe out years of rankings overnight. This one moved in the opposite direction because the gains and the risks were handled together.

The speed came from the architecture itself - statically-generated pages are fast by default, and fast, stable pages are exactly what both Google and impatient visitors reward. The reach came from the per-city structure, which turned one program into many genuinely useful local pages. The content velocity came from the headless CMS, so the team could keep the site fresh - a signal search values - without a developer bottleneck. Fast, well-structured, freshly updated, and migrated without losing its existing equity: those are the ingredients behind the lift in organic traffic.

The outcome

The new site shipped in four weeks. After the rebuild, organic search traffic grew by around 120%, and enquiries rose alongside it - the fast, well-ranked pages were finally doing the job the old WordPress site could not.

Just as important, the result is durable and owned by the client. Their own team can extend the site - new courses, new cities, new posts - on an architecture built to scale, instead of going back to a developer for every change. And because it is a clean, standard Next.js and headless-CMS build, nothing about it is locked to us: the code and the content are theirs.