Why We Moved From WordPress to Next.js (And Why It Matters)

For over a decade, WordPress was our home. It powered our website, our client sites, and honestly, it worked fine - until it didn't. Here's the story of why we moved to Next.js, what we learned, and why your tech stack matters more than you think.

Why We Left WordPress

WordPress powers 40% of the internet, and for good reason - it's flexible, has a massive plugin ecosystem, and anyone can learn it. But that flexibility comes with baggage. Our WordPress site had accumulated dozens of plugins, each adding weight and potential security vulnerabilities. Page load times crept up. We got hacked (twice). And every update felt like defusing a bomb - would the new version break something?

The Performance Difference

Our old WordPress site scored in the 40s–60s on Google PageSpeed. Our new Next.js site consistently hits 95+ on both mobile and desktop. That's not a minor improvement - it's a different league. Next.js pre-renders pages at build time, serves them from edge servers worldwide, and only loads the JavaScript needed for each page. The result: pages load in under a second. Visitors stay longer, bounce less, and convert more.

Security That Actually Works

WordPress sites get hacked because they have a database, a login page, and a plugin ecosystem that's a constant attack surface. Our Next.js site has none of that. There's no database to inject into. No wp-admin to brute-force. No plugins to exploit. Our content lives in Sanity (a headless CMS), completely separate from the frontend. It's not that Next.js is unhackable - it's that the attack surface is dramatically smaller.

The Developer Experience

Working in Next.js with React is a fundamentally better development experience. Components are reusable, styling is scoped, deployments are instant via Vercel, and version control (Git) means we can track every change and roll back if needed. With WordPress, a plugin update could silently break something and you might not notice for weeks. With Next.js, we know exactly what changed and when.

What About Content Management?

"But WordPress is so easy to edit!" - fair point. That's why we use Sanity as our headless CMS. It gives us (and our clients) a clean, intuitive editing interface without any of the WordPress bloat. You can edit content, preview changes, and publish - all from a custom Studio. The best of both worlds: modern performance with user-friendly content management.

Is Next.js Right for Every Business?

Not necessarily. If you need a quick blog and don't care about performance, WordPress still works. But if your website is a core part of your business - if it needs to load fast, look professional, rank well on Google, and stay secure - a modern stack like Next.js is worth the investment. The web has evolved. Your website should too.