Migrating a website from WordPress with Gatsby to Strapi with React can potentially improve the site's Google visibility by a factor of 10.
Migrating a website from WordPress to a modern stack like Strapi and React can have significant benefits for SEO and overall performance. While there is no guarantee that such a migration will result in a ten-fold increase in Google visibility, there are several reasons why it could lead to significant improvements.
Why did we choose Strapi and React?
There are several reasons why this might be the case. First, Gatsby is a static site generator, which means that it generates HTML files for each page on the site at build time. This can be faster and more secure than a traditional dynamic website, but it can also make it more difficult for search engines to crawl and index the site's content. This means that the site is faster to load and requires fewer resources on the server, which can improve its ranking on search engines. Additionally, Gatsby comes with a number of features that make it easier to optimize a site for SEO, such as the automatic generation of sitemaps, integration with Google Analytics, and support for schema.org markup.
On the other hand, Strapi is a headless content management system (CMS) that allows developers to build custom applications using the React JavaScript library. This gives them more control over the site's architecture and allows them to build a more flexible, scalable, and performant application. It provides a user-friendly interface for creating and managing content, as well as a powerful API for accessing that content from your front-end applications. By using Strapi as the back-end for your website, you can easily create and update content without the need for a developer, which can help you keep your website up-to-date and relevant to your audience.
In addition, using a modern JavaScript library like React can also improve the site's performance and user experience, which can have a positive impact on its search engine rankings.
Overall, while it's difficult to quantify the exact impact of such a migration on a website's Google visibility, it's likely that the combination of a headless CMS and a modern JavaScript library can have a significant positive impact on the site's search engine performance. However, it is important to keep in mind that there are no guarantees when it comes to SEO. Google's algorithms are constantly changing, and what works today may not work tomorrow. Therefore, it is important to focus on creating high-quality, relevant content and continually optimizing your website to ensure that it is as visible as possible on search engines.
Our case is different, we lost our visibility after launching the site on WordPress with Gatsby. So the decision about building the website with this technological stack was wrong. After one year of improvements in Gatsby, we realized that it will not work as we expected.
It was a hard decision to handle to change the tech stack of our website. We decided to choose React.js with Strapi, not only because they are fresh and modern technologies, but mainly because our Team works with this stack and knows it very well.
Migration process and results
The migration process took started with exchanging blog and services pages from WordPress CMS to Strapi. It is rather easy and you can find a lot of documentation about it. After confirming that all data are migrated properly we have prepared a new design having in mind all previous issues concerning User Experience and User Interface. Our UX/UI Team took care of user interfaces: they refreshed all the pages and gave them a new structure and user-friendly look. At this stage, our front-end developers took care of the rest. Below is the screen showing how the visibility has changed after launching the new website with Strapi and React.js
Before the launch of the new page, our visibility was about 50 queries a day, mainly branded. It was not big traffic. But after launching a new website and letting to crawl by google all our pages we reached 700 queries a day.
Of course, not only visibility and search engine optimization has changed but our page speed increased and performance now is better thanks to React with Strapi.
That is the performance score before changes on mobile and desktop:
And this is the performance score on mobile and desktop after the changes:
We feel that the way we choose is one of good success in the Google search engine. The page started working as we expected and finally, we have a very international business audience on queries we choose to describe our services.
