Your WordPress Site Just Failed Core Web Vitals Again. Here's Your Exit.

Why Leave WordPress Behind

WordPress powers roughly 40% of the web, but that market share hides real structural problems. Your marketing team fights with page builders. Your developers hack around a 20-year-old PHP templating system. Your Lighthouse scores sit in the amber-and-red zone no matter how many caching plugins you stack.

The core issue: WordPress was designed as a monolith. Content, presentation, and logic are tangled together in a single application. Every plugin adds weight. Every theme update risks breaking something. The attack surface is enormous -- WordPress accounts for over 90% of CMS-related security vulnerabilities.

A headless architecture fixes this by separating content management from content delivery. You get a purpose-built CMS for editing and a modern frontend framework like Next.js for rendering. The result: sub-second page loads, green Core Web Vitals across the board, and a developer experience that doesn't involve debugging functions.php at 2am.

The Pain Points We Solve

Performance That Won't Budge

Typical WordPress sites score 45-65 on Lighthouse Mobile, even with aggressive optimization. Server-rendered PHP, render-blocking plugin scripts, images served without a proper CDN pipeline -- these are structural problems, not configuration issues. You can't plugin your way to a 95+ score.

Plugin Dependency Hell

The average WordPress site runs 20-30 plugins. Each one's a potential security vulnerability, a performance bottleneck, and a compatibility risk on every WordPress core update. We've audited sites where removing unused plugins alone cut TTFB by 40%.

Editorial Bottlenecks

Your content team shouldn't need a developer to publish a blog post or update a landing page. Yet page builders like Elementor and WPBakery create brittle layouts that break on mobile, generate bloated markup, and lock content into presentation-specific formats.

SEO Fragility

Yoast gives you green lights in the editor, but your actual Core Web Vitals are failing. Google's ranking signals care about real-world performance data from CrUX, not plugin checkboxes. Poor TTFB, layout shift from lazy-loaded ads, render-blocking CSS -- these are what's killing your rankings.

Security Overhead

WordPress requires constant patching. Brute-force login attempts, SQL injection vectors through plugins, and XML-RPC exploits are weekly realities. A headless frontend deployed as static assets on a CDN has no server to attack.

What You Get With a Headless Stack

We migrate WordPress sites to one of four headless CMS platforms, paired with Next.js on the frontend. The right choice depends on your team, your content model, and your budget.

Sanity

Best for teams that need maximum content modeling flexibility. Sanity's real-time collaborative editing, GROQ query language, and customizable Studio make it ideal for complex content operations. Git-based schema definitions mean your content model's version-controlled alongside your code. SOC 2 compliant, GDPR-ready.

Payload CMS

Best for teams that want zero vendor lock-in. Payload's open-source and self-hosted, written in TypeScript, and runs on your own infrastructure. No per-seat pricing, no API call limits, no surprise invoices. Perfect for UK teams with strict data sovereignty requirements under GDPR. We deploy Payload on your own AWS, Cloudflare, or Hetzner infrastructure.

Contentful

Best for enterprise teams with existing Contentful contracts or complex localization needs. Strong SDK ecosystem, mature API, built-in CDN. The tradeoff is cost -- Contentful's pricing scales aggressively at the Premium tier. We help you design content models that minimize API calls and keep costs predictable.

Storyblok

Best for marketing-led teams that need visual editing. Storyblok's real-time visual editor lets non-technical users build and preview pages without developer intervention. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified. Its component-based architecture maps cleanly to React/Next.js component libraries.

Our Migration Process

Every migration follows a six-phase process built around one principle: your site never goes down, and your rankings never drop.

Phase 1: Audit & Architecture (Week 1-2)

We crawl your existing WordPress site with Screaming Frog and Lighthouse CI. Every URL, redirect chain, structured data block, internal link, and content relationship gets mapped. We document your current Core Web Vitals baseline from CrUX data -- not lab scores, real field data.

From there, we design the target content model in your chosen CMS and map every WordPress content type, custom field, taxonomy, and media asset to its headless equivalent.

Phase 2: Content Migration (Week 2-4)

We export WordPress content via WP-CLI and custom Node.js extraction scripts. Rich text gets converted to portable formats -- Sanity's Portable Text, Storyblok's rich text JSON, or Payload's Slate/Lexical format. Images are processed, optimized, and uploaded to the CMS or an external DAM.

This isn't a one-shot export. We build repeatable migration scripts that can re-run right before launch to catch any content published during the build phase.

Phase 3: Frontend Build (Week 3-6)

We rebuild your frontend in Next.js 15 with the App Router. Every page gets server-side rendering or static generation based on its update frequency. We use ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) for content that changes frequently and full static generation for evergreen pages.

Image optimization runs through Next.js Image with automatic WebP/AVIF conversion and responsive srcsets. Fonts are self-hosted and preloaded. CSS is scoped per component with zero unused styles in production.

Phase 4: SEO Preservation (Week 5-6)

This is where most agencies fail and where we obsess. Every URL from the old site maps 1:1 to the new site or gets a 301 redirect via Next.js middleware. We preserve:

• All existing URL structures (or implement clean redirects if restructuring)
• Schema.org structured data (Article, BreadcrumbList, FAQ, Product -- whatever you had, plus additions)
• Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata
• XML sitemaps with proper lastmod dates
• Canonical tags and hreflang for international sites
• Internal link equity through comprehensive link mapping

We run before-and-after crawl comparisons to verify zero indexable URLs are lost.

Phase 5: Zero-Downtime Deployment (Week 6-7)

We run the new Next.js site in parallel with your WordPress instance. Vercel's atomic deployments -- or Cloudflare Pages, depending on your stack -- let us flip traffic instantly. DNS propagation's handled via low-TTL records set days in advance.

If anything looks wrong -- traffic anomaly, crawl error spike, CMS API issue -- we roll back in under 60 seconds.

Phase 6: Validation & Handoff (Week 7-8)

Post-launch, we monitor Google Search Console for crawl errors, indexation changes, and Core Web Vitals regressions for 30 days. We run Lighthouse CI on every page template and validate scores against our guarantee.

Your team gets hands-on training in the new CMS, a documented content operations guide, and a rundown of common tasks.

Our Core Web Vitals Guarantee

We guarantee 100% green Core Web Vitals on every page template at launch. That means:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): under 2.5 seconds
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): under 200 milliseconds
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): under 0.1

These are field data targets, not just lab scores. If we don't hit them, we fix them at no additional cost.

Timeline & Pricing

We price fixed-fee based on scope. No hourly billing that punishes you for complexity.

• Starter (under 500 pages, standard content model): £8,000 – £15,000 / $10,000 – $18,000
• Growth (500-5,000 pages, custom integrations): £15,000 – £40,000 / $18,000 – $50,000
• Enterprise (5,000+ pages, multi-locale, complex workflows): £40,000 – £120,000 / $50,000 – $150,000

Timelines range from 6-8 weeks for Starter to 12-16 weeks for Enterprise. Every project includes 30 days of post-launch support and monitoring.

CMS platform costs are separate and vary by provider. Payload self-hosted starts at £0/month for the CMS itself. Sanity Growth starts at roughly $300/month. We model costs accurately during the audit phase -- no surprises.

Who This Is For

You should talk to us if:

• Your WordPress site scores below 70 on Lighthouse Mobile and you've exhausted plugin-based optimization
• Your development team spends more time maintaining WordPress than building features
• Your content team's fighting with page builders instead of publishing content
• You're paying for managed WordPress hosting that costs more than a modern headless stack
• You need to hit performance-based SEO targets and your current architecture won't get you there

We work with marketing teams, product teams, and CTOs across the UK and US. We've migrated editorial sites, e-commerce stores, SaaS marketing sites, and multi-brand content platforms.