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A 60k-post publisher moved to headless WordPress + Next.js without losing a ranking
- 60,412
- Posts migrated, zero URL changes
- 100%
- Core Web Vitals passing (was 12%)
- +41%
- Pages per session
- 0
- Editorial workflow changes required
The challenge
A finance publisher with 60k posts was failing Core Web Vitals sitewide and watching competitors take AI-search citations. But the newsroom lived in the WordPress editor, and any migration that changed editorial workflow was a non-starter.
What was built
- 01
Kept WordPress exactly as the newsroom knew it and exposed content through WPGraphQL with a hardened, cached schema.
- 02
Built a Next.js App Router front end with ISR: article pages regenerate on publish via webhook, evergreen pages revalidate hourly.
- 03
Preserved every URL, every redirect and all ad slots; editors got draft preview on the production front end before publishing.
- 04
Structured data pipeline (Article, NewsArticle, breadcrumbs) generated from the same content graph, making the archive AI-citation friendly.
The outcome
The site went from 12% to 100% passing Core Web Vitals with zero ranking loss through the cutover. Pages per session rose 41% on the faster front end, and the newsroom's only change was that preview got faster.