Oasis Senior Advisors, from WordPress to headless Next.js

Overview

Oasis Senior Advisors is a national senior living advisory franchise: marketing content, local territory landing pages and a searchable community guide. I led the migration from a traditional WordPress site to a Next.js front end, with WordPress kept headless.

The challenge

The marketing team already edited the site in Elementor, and they had to keep doing it. The migration could not ask them to learn a new tool, and it could not make the site slower. The target was the opposite: the image-heavy pages needed their Core Web Vitals to improve.

Key features

• WordPress stays the editor. Content comes through a custom WPGraphQL integration, so the team keeps working in Elementor.
• Resources and a blog from WordPress: the senior resources and the blog posts are written in WordPress and read by the Next.js site through GraphQL.
• The WordPress origin is never exposed: CSS and images are served through a Next.js proxy.
• Local territory pages and a community guide rendered by Next.js.
• Targeted LCP work on the image-heavy pages.

Technologies used

• Front end: Next.js, React, TypeScript.
• Content: headless WordPress, WPGraphQL, Elementor.
• Testing and infrastructure: end to end tests with Cypress in CI, AWS.

Outcome

96 desktop Lighthouse, 0.8 s LCP and 0 CLS on the pages that were worked on. The report is in the project's repository.