WordPress Migration Services: Next.js Rebuilds

WordPress to Next.js migration is a rebuild service for teams whose WordPress site is capped by plugin bloat, PHP rendering overhead, and a Lighthouse Mobile score stuck in the 40s or 50s. It's for growth leads, in-house engineers, and marketing teams who've hit the ceiling: hosting bills climbing, security patches arriving weekly, organic traffic flatlining while competitors on modern stacks pull ahead. The migration replaces server-rendered PHP with static generation and edge caching on Vercel, swaps your plugin stack for a headless CMS -- Sanity or Payload -- and rebuilds every template as a Next.js component. URLs stay identical. Meta titles, descriptions, and structured data transfer with 301 redirects mapped one-to-one, so backlinks and rankings carry over rather than reset. Content editors get Incremental Static Regeneration, meaning published updates go live in seconds rather than waiting on a cache purge. A standard migration runs 6-8 weeks from kickoff to launch, covering a full SEO audit, content migration, frontend rebuild, redirect implementation, and QA. Sites with e-commerce, custom post types, or 1,000+ pages typically need 10-12 weeks. Pricing starts at $15,000 for a standard migration and $25,000 for e-commerce builds with product catalogs and checkout flows, both fixed-fee with 60 days of post-launch monitoring included. The end state: a site that loads in under 300ms, scores 90+ on Lighthouse Mobile, and runs on infrastructure that costs a fraction of managed WordPress hosting plus plugin licenses.

Who this is for -- and when it's the wrong choice

This fits sites where WordPress has become the bottleneck rather than a convenience: service businesses with 50-500 pages, e-commerce stores with real product catalogs, or content operations publishing daily that can't wait on a 90-second cache purge. If you're watching a plugin update break your checkout flow, or you're paying $200+/month across hosting and premium licenses just to keep the lights on, this is the fix.

It's the wrong choice if your site is under 20 pages with minimal traffic and no growth plan -- the fixed fee won't pay itself back fast enough to matter. It's also the wrong call if your business genuinely depends on a WordPress-specific plugin ecosystem with no Next.js equivalent and no appetite to rebuild that functionality natively. And if you're mid-way through a rebrand or a business model pivot, migrate after that settles, not before -- you don't want to rebuild the same templates twice. If you're still deciding between platforms at all, our WordPress vs Next.js comparison breaks down the trade-offs in more detail.

How we do it

We run this as a five-phase build, not a theme conversion.

Phase 1 -- Discovery and SEO audit (weeks 1-2). We crawl the full site, export every URL, meta title, meta description, Open Graph tag, structured data block, and internal link. We cross-reference against Search Console data and document every plugin's actual function so nothing gets dropped by accident. You receive a complete URL mapping document, an SEO baseline report, and a content inventory.

Phase 2 -- Content migration and CMS setup (weeks 2-4). Content comes out of WordPress via the REST API or a direct database export and goes into your new headless CMS as properly modelled content types -- not a flat dump. Images get converted to WebP/AVIF and resized responsively during the move.

Phase 3 -- Frontend development (weeks 3-6). Every WordPress template is rebuilt as a React component in Next.js, using static generation for content pages, ISR for anything that updates frequently, and server components where personalization is needed.

Phase 4 -- SEO preservation (weeks 5-7). Every old URL gets a 301 redirect implemented in edge middleware -- no cold starts. Metadata is verified against Search Console's indexed versions, not just copied. Structured data gets upgraded, not just carried over. A sitemap goes out via next-sitemap the day we launch.

Phase 5 -- Launch and monitoring (weeks 7-8+). We cut over DNS with zero downtime and monitor Search Console, rankings, Core Web Vitals, and backlink integrity daily for 60 days. You get a working site, a redirect map you own, and a monitoring report at the end of that window. Some teams bring us in through the shorter migration sprint format when the scope is tighter and the timeline needs to move faster.

What we've shipped

SleepDr.com, a sleep medicine practice, moved from WordPress to Next.js 15 with Payload CMS and Supabase, built with a HIPAA-safe architecture -- patient forms run through a HIPAA-compliant Jotform so no PHI touches our servers -- plus medical schema, 20 city landing pages, and four-language support. Lighthouse went from 35 to 94. It's a verified 5.0 Clutch review. Full write-up: /blog/sleepdr-wordpress-to-nextjs-migration-lighthouse-35-to-94/.

bdManagedIT, a Central-Georgia managed IT provider, came off WordPress onto Astro, Sanity, and Netlify -- a different flavour of the same problem. The rebuild hit 95+ PageSpeed with zero-JS static pages, added service, industry, and location pages, built out HIPAA/PCI-DSS/CJIS/SOX compliance guides, and wired in HubSpot CRM plus AI-search schema. Case study: /blog/bdmanagedit-msp-wordpress-to-astro-sanity-case-study/.

Both started in the same place -- a WordPress install fighting its own architecture -- and landed on a stack that doesn't need weekly patching to stay upright.

Sources

Core Web Vitals are a documented Google ranking signal, and web.dev's vitals guide is the reference we build against for load, interactivity, and layout stability targets. Redirect handling follows Google's own 301 redirect guidance. The frontend work is built on documented Next.js and Payload CMS APIs, not undocumented workarounds.

Next step

If your Lighthouse Mobile score is stuck in the 40s and 50s and you're tired of paying for plugin licenses that fight each other, get in touch. We'll audit your current site, tell you honestly whether migration is the right call, and give you a fixed-fee quote -- contact us or check current pricing first if you want the numbers before the call.