Recipe Website Migration to Next.js
Budget: $1,500 – $3,000 USD
We run a recipe website with around 2,400 published posts that earns its revenue from display advertising and affiliate links. Traffic is roughly 400,000 sessions a month, almost entirely organic from Google, with strong rankings on a few hundred recipe keywords. The site currently runs on WordPress with a heavily customised theme accumulated over eight years, and mobile page speed has degraded to the point where it is affecting both ad revenue and rankings. We want to move to a headless setup with WordPress retained as the editorial backend and a Next.js front end, and the entire point of the project is that we do this without losing organic traffic.
That last part is the requirement everything else serves. Every existing URL must resolve to the same content at the same address, or where a change is genuinely unavoidable, through a single 301 redirect with no chains. Existing structured data for recipes must be preserved and improved, since our rich results in Google carry a large share of our clicks, and the migration must not drop any recipe schema fields we currently populate including ratings, times, yield, ingredients, instructions and nutrition. Internal linking must survive intact.
The build covers a Next.js front end consuming WordPress content, with page types for the homepage, recipe posts, category and tag archives, an author page, search, and a small set of static pages. Rendering strategy is your recommendation to argue for, but the outcome required is that a recipe page loads fast on a mid-range Android phone on a throttled connection and that newly published or edited posts appear on the live site without waiting for a full rebuild, because our editors publish several times a day and will not accept a delay.
Our ad provider serves through a standard tag and our affiliate links are inserted in post content. Both must continue to work exactly as now, with ad slots in the same positions relative to content, and lazy loading of ads below the fold. Images are the largest weight on every page and need modern formats served responsively from wherever you propose to host them.
Editors must keep the Gutenberg experience they know, including our existing recipe block, and a working preview of unpublished drafts. If preserving any custom block requires rework, tell me in your bid rather than discovering it in week four.
Deliverables are the complete front-end source in a repository we own, the WordPress instance configured as a headless backend with the front end deployed and running, a full redirect map with every URL verified, a documented deployment and rollback process, a pre-launch checklist covering sitemaps, robots directives, canonical tags and schema validation, and a written handover explaining the architecture. I want a staging environment mirroring production data available throughout.
I will provide server access, a database export, our analytics and Search Console access, the ad provider documentation, and a content editor available for testing.
Timeline is eight weeks. Milestones split across staging environment with recipe and archive templates rendering, ad and affiliate integration verified, redirect map and SEO checklist signed off, and finally launch with two weeks of monitoring included. Launch happens only after we compare rendered output against production on a sample of fifty URLs.
In your bid, tell me how you would keep publishing near-instant without rebuilding the whole site, and how you would verify before launch that no recipe has lost schema fields.
That last part is the requirement everything else serves. Every existing URL must resolve to the same content at the same address, or where a change is genuinely unavoidable, through a single 301 redirect with no chains. Existing structured data for recipes must be preserved and improved, since our rich results in Google carry a large share of our clicks, and the migration must not drop any recipe schema fields we currently populate including ratings, times, yield, ingredients, instructions and nutrition. Internal linking must survive intact.
The build covers a Next.js front end consuming WordPress content, with page types for the homepage, recipe posts, category and tag archives, an author page, search, and a small set of static pages. Rendering strategy is your recommendation to argue for, but the outcome required is that a recipe page loads fast on a mid-range Android phone on a throttled connection and that newly published or edited posts appear on the live site without waiting for a full rebuild, because our editors publish several times a day and will not accept a delay.
Our ad provider serves through a standard tag and our affiliate links are inserted in post content. Both must continue to work exactly as now, with ad slots in the same positions relative to content, and lazy loading of ads below the fold. Images are the largest weight on every page and need modern formats served responsively from wherever you propose to host them.
Editors must keep the Gutenberg experience they know, including our existing recipe block, and a working preview of unpublished drafts. If preserving any custom block requires rework, tell me in your bid rather than discovering it in week four.
Deliverables are the complete front-end source in a repository we own, the WordPress instance configured as a headless backend with the front end deployed and running, a full redirect map with every URL verified, a documented deployment and rollback process, a pre-launch checklist covering sitemaps, robots directives, canonical tags and schema validation, and a written handover explaining the architecture. I want a staging environment mirroring production data available throughout.
I will provide server access, a database export, our analytics and Search Console access, the ad provider documentation, and a content editor available for testing.
Timeline is eight weeks. Milestones split across staging environment with recipe and archive templates rendering, ad and affiliate integration verified, redirect map and SEO checklist signed off, and finally launch with two weeks of monitoring included. Launch happens only after we compare rendered output against production on a sample of fifty URLs.
In your bid, tell me how you would keep publishing near-instant without rebuilding the whole site, and how you would verify before launch that no recipe has lost schema fields.