The starting point
Sundial's marketing site was on a heavily customized WordPress install, hosted on a server that nobody on the team had logged into in over a year. Page load times hovered around four seconds. The marketing team had stopped publishing because edits were painful and they were afraid of breaking the theme.
They also had real SEO equity — about forty pages that drove the majority of inbound traffic. Anything we did had to preserve every one of those URLs.
What we did
We mapped the entire existing site — every page, every redirect, every URL with non-trivial traffic. That map became the contract: nothing in it could break.
The new site was a Next.js application with content in MDX, sitting in the same repo as the rest of the marketing team's work. We rebuilt the design from the ground up — same brand, cleaner execution — and ported every page by hand, paying attention to title structure, meta descriptions, and internal linking.
Forms went to a hosted form provider rather than a custom backend. The team didn't need server-side logic; they needed a site they could update.
The hard parts
The redirects. WordPress had accumulated years of taxonomy changes, slug renames, and category restructures, with most of them papered over by plugin-managed redirect chains. We unwound those chains, captured the final destinations, and consolidated everything into a single next.config.ts redirects block — auditable, version-controlled, and explainable to a non-engineer.
The other hard part was the editorial workflow. The marketing team was comfortable in WordPress's WYSIWYG editor and nervous about MDX. We built a thin authoring guide, paired with them on the first half-dozen edits, and within two weeks they were shipping content updates on their own through pull requests.
Outcome
Lighthouse performance went from a high-50s to consistent high-90s. Organic traffic held steady through the cutover and was up nineteen percent six months later — a combination of better page speed, cleaner internal linking, and a marketing team that was suddenly publishing again. The site has had zero downtime since the migration.