This project is a headless WordPress with Next.js build for an independent financial advisory firm whose website is, in practice, its library. Four hundred articles and market notes explain pensions, investing, tax years and market moves to clients and prospective clients. The content was good and the team published steadily, but the site was slow on phones and organic traffic had stopped growing.
We kept WordPress as the place where writing and compliance review happen and replaced everything a reader touches with a Next.js front end, rendered ahead of time and served from a CDN. The result is a financial advice content website that loads almost instantly, keeps a recorded compliance sign-off for every article, and generates its own search metadata from the content itself.
About the Client
The client is an independent financial advisory firm with a small in-house editorial team and a compliance officer who must approve anything published under the firm’s name. Articles range from evergreen guides that stay relevant for years to short market notes written in response to a rate decision or a market fall.
Two things mattered as much as speed. The writers and the compliance officer were already trained on WordPress and did not want a new editing tool. And because the firm is regulated, the review of each article had to be provable later, not just agreed in a meeting or ticked in a spreadsheet.
Project Goals
Make articles fast on mobile, where most readers arrive from search.
Keep the WordPress editing experience the team already knew.
Record a compliance sign-off for every article, with reviewer, date and notes, before it can go live.
Generate structured data, canonical URLs and metadata from content fields instead of a plugin.
Bring older evergreen articles back into view through topic and author archives.
Project Overview
The Challenge and Our Solution
The Challenge
Four hundred articles and market notes sat on a plugin-heavy WordPress site that took four seconds to render on mobile. Every article also needed a recorded compliance review before publication, which the team was tracking in a separate spreadsheet. Organic traffic had flattened despite steady publishing.
Our Solution
We kept WordPress as the editing environment — the writers and compliance officer already knew it — and put a Next.js front end in front of it, pulling content through the REST API and rendering statically with on-demand revalidation. Compliance review became a custom workflow state inside WordPress with an audit trail, so nothing can be published without a recorded sign-off. Structured data, canonical URLs and per-article metadata are generated from CMS fields rather than a plugin.
Why Headless WordPress with Next.js
The old site rendered every page on request through a stack of plugins, which is why a single article took around four seconds to appear on a phone. Rebuilding the whole platform would have meant retraining the team and migrating hundreds of articles into an unfamiliar system.
A headless approach separated the two jobs. WordPress stays the editing environment and content store; Next.js reads articles, authors and categories through the WordPress REST API and turns them into pages before anyone visits. Readers get pre-built HTML from the edge, and editors keep exactly the screens they already use.
WordPress kept for writing, editing and media
Next.js App Router for the reader-facing site
Content delivered through the WordPress REST API
Pages served from Cloudflare’s edge cache
Publishing in Seconds with Incremental Static Regeneration
Pre-rendering is only useful if new content still appears quickly. With incremental static regeneration, publishing in WordPress triggers on-demand revalidation for the affected article, its topic hub and its author page, so the change is live within seconds without rebuilding the whole site.
This suits the mix of the firm’s content. Evergreen guides are served from cache almost indefinitely, while a market note written on the morning of a rate decision reaches readers as soon as it is approved.
A Compliance Approval Workflow Inside WordPress
Before the rebuild, compliance review was tracked in a separate spreadsheet, so the record of who approved what lived outside the system that published it. We added custom post statuses to WordPress — draft, in review, approved and published — so review is part of the publishing flow itself.
Each status change stores the reviewer, the time and any notes against the article, and an article cannot reach the front end until an approval is recorded. When the firm needs to show how a piece was reviewed, the full audit trail is attached to the article.
Custom statuses for draft, review, approval and publication
Reviewer, date and notes stored with every decision
No publication without a recorded sign-off
Audit trail kept alongside the content
Structured Data and Archives That Work for Search
Metadata used to come from a plugin and drifted out of step with the content. Now Article, author and organisation schema, canonical URLs and per-article titles and descriptions are generated from CMS fields as each page is rendered, so they are always consistent with what the article actually says.
Topic and author archives were rebuilt as fast, filterable pages. Older guides that had slipped out of sight are now reachable from the topics readers search for, which gives steady publishing a longer life. Over the eight months after launch, organic sessions rose by 180% on the same publishing cadence.
Our Process
How We Delivered It
1
Content and Workflow Audit
We reviewed the article library, the plugins behind each page and how compliance review was really tracked, and measured mobile performance on the busiest articles.
2
Front-End Design and Component Library
We designed article layouts, topic hubs and author pages as typed React components, so every page type shares one consistent, accessible system.
3
Workflow States in WordPress
We added the review and approval statuses with the audit trail, and tested them with the compliance officer before any front-end work depended on them.
4
Next.js Build and Revalidation
We connected the front end to the REST API, set up pre-rendering with on-demand revalidation and generated structured data and metadata from content fields.
5
Launch on the Edge
We put Cloudflare in front of the site, kept every existing URL working, and set up automated builds and tests so later changes deploy without downtime.
Key Features
What We Delivered
Static rendering with revalidation
Pages are pre-rendered and refresh within seconds of an editor publishing.
Compliance workflow
Draft, review and approval states with reviewer, date and notes stored against each article.
Structured data from fields
Article, author and organisation schema generated from CMS data, not hand-written.
Topic and author archives
Fast, filterable archives that surface older evergreen content instead of burying it.
Outcome
Results and Impact
Mobile largest contentful paint down from about 4s to under 1s.
Organic sessions up 180% over eight months on the same publishing cadence.
Compliance sign-off recorded in the CMS with a full audit trail.
Editors kept the WordPress interface they were already trained on.
Tech Stack
How It Is Built
WordPress stayed where the writers were; everything readers touch is React, rendered ahead of time and served from the edge.
Front end
Next.js (App Router)
Server-rendered and statically generated pages with incremental static regeneration, so an editor’s publish is live within seconds without a rebuild.
React 19 + TypeScript
Component library for article layouts, topic hubs, author pages and the search interface, typed end to end.
JSON-LD structured data
Article, author and organisation schema generated from CMS fields rather than a plugin.
Content & workflow
Headless WordPress
The editing environment the writers and compliance officer already knew, kept exactly as it was.
WordPress REST API
Delivers articles, authors and taxonomy to the front end; on-demand revalidation is triggered on publish.
Custom post status + audit trail
Draft, review, approved and published states with reviewer, time and note recorded, so nothing publishes without a sign-off.
Delivery
Cloudflare CDN
Edge caching of the pre-rendered pages and images; the origin is rarely touched by a reader.
Node.js hosting with CI
Pull requests build and test automatically; merges deploy with zero downtime.
Live demo
Vite + React Router
The hosted demo mirrors the front end as a single-page app so anyone can try the editorial workflow.
Open market data feeds
FRED, Bank of England, ONS, LBMA and Alpha Vantage series pulled hourly into JSON and drawn with hand-built SVG charts.
Client Feedback
What the Client Says
★★★★★
Four seconds to under one, and organic traffic followed.
Head of DigitalIndependent financial advisory firm
Services
Services Behind This Project
The Headless CMS, Next.js, WordPress expertise we used to build this headless cms website — and can bring to yours.
Next.js websites and web apps with server-side rendering, static generation, image optimisation and route-level code splitting for top Core Web Vitals.
Custom React.js front ends, dashboards and single-page applications built with TypeScript, reusable components and server-side rendering for SEO.
Learn more
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Why keep WordPress instead of moving to a new CMS?
Because the editors and the compliance officer already knew it, and their time is better spent writing and reviewing than learning a new tool. A headless setup kept the familiar editing screens while removing the slow, plugin-heavy front end that caused the performance problems readers were experiencing.
How quickly do published changes appear on a headless site?
With incremental static regeneration and on-demand revalidation, an approved article is usually live within seconds. Publishing in WordPress tells the front end which pages changed, so only those pages are rebuilt while the rest of the site keeps serving from cache.
Can a compliance approval workflow be added to an existing WordPress site?
Yes. Custom post statuses and a recorded audit trail can be added without changing how editors write. The important part is enforcing the rule in the publishing path itself, so nothing can reach readers without a recorded sign-off, rather than relying on a separate checklist.
Does a Next.js front end help SEO for a financial content website?
It helps in two ways: pages load much faster, especially on mobile, and metadata and structured data are generated consistently from content fields. Search performance still depends on useful content, but removing slow pages and inconsistent markup lets good articles compete fairly.
What affects the cost of a headless WordPress project?
The main factors are the number of page types to design, how much existing content needs cleaning or restructuring, any custom workflows such as approvals, and integrations like search or market data. Keeping WordPress as the editing tool usually reduces cost compared with a full CMS migration.
Will existing URLs and rankings survive a move to headless?
They should, if the move is planned for it. We keep URLs identical where possible, add redirects where structure changes, preserve canonical tags and metadata, and check search console data after launch so any dropped pages are found and fixed quickly.
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