VerzNexus sought to enhance their blog system by transitioning from Framer CMS to Strapi, aiming to improve performance, SEO, and user experience. The goal was to build a scalable, high performance blog with fast page loads, SEO friendly content, and an intuitive CMS for writers.

Why Strapi? Framer’s CMS had limitations in providing direct API access, which is essential for building a fast and SEO friendly blog. Strapi, a headless CMS, provides a powerful API, allowing for dynamic pre rendering with Next.js. This decision was driven by the need to:

Increase SEO Visibility: Strapi supports structured data, Open Graph tags, and metadata, which are essential for SEO optimization.

Speed & Performance: Using Strapi with Next.js ensures that blog posts are pre rendered at build time, which minimizes page load time and ensures better performance across devices.

Strapi Configuration:

Tag Content Type: Created for filtering URLs, containing a name (text) and slug (UID).

Category Content Type: Structured with name (text) and slug (UID) for seamless categorization.

SEO Component: Added meta title, meta description, and Open Graph image, each with character limits and tooltips to guide writers.

Markdown/WYSIWYG Support: Writers can choose between Markdown for content formatting or a WYSIWYG editor for ease of use.

Why Next.js? Next.js was selected for its static site generation (SSG) capabilities, ensuring fast loading and excellent SEO indexing. The dynamic routing and page pre rendering functionality fit perfectly with the project’s goals.

Pages & Dynamic Routing:

/blog: Paginated list of blog posts (6-12 per page), with easy to read URLs like /blog/title-of-post.

/blog/:slug: Each article dynamically loaded by its slug, ensuring a fast and user friendly article page.

SEO Enhancements:

Automatically generated meta tags for each blog post, including canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, Twitter card tags, and Schema.org markup for article structure.

Sitemap.xml generated automatically, and robots.txt configured to ensure optimal crawlability.

Filtering & Search:

Integrated client side search for real time results based on title and excerpt matching.

Added filters for tags, categories, and search functionality to help users find relevant content quickly.

Intuitive Content Management: The CMS was designed to be user-friendly, especially for writers with minimal technical knowledge.

Writers’ Role Access: Writers have access only to Articles, Tags, Categories, and SEO components. They have no access to roles, plugins, or global settings, ensuring secure content management.

Blog Template: Provided a blog-template.md in the repository, guiding writers on SEO best practices (headlines, meta descriptions, keywords), content formatting, and interlinking rules.

Content Management Features:

Pagination for Articles: Ensures users can browse large content collections without excessive scrolling.

Related Articles: Displayed based on shared categories or tags, encouraging users to explore more content on the site.

Auto Generated SEO Components: For every post, auto generated SEO meta tags, Open Graph data, and Twitter card tags.

To meet the project’s SEO and performance goals, the following steps were taken:

Google Lighthouse Audits were used to ensure Performance (90+), SEO (90+), and Accessibility (90+) scores were met.

PageSpeed Insights tests were passed for both mobile (80+) and desktop (90+) scores.

Ensured Google Search Console readiness by making pages crawlable and indexable, ensuring minimal JavaScript rendering.

Optimized for Speed & SEO:

Pre rendered Pages via Next.js with content dynamically fetched from Strapi.

Vercel Hosting was used for fast CDN delivery, minimizing build times and ensuring pages load efficiently.

Minimal Third Party Dependencies were used, with no reliance on Framer or low code shortcuts, ensuring a clean and scalable codebase.

Clear Documentation for Maintenance:

A README file included detailed instructions for:

Infrastructure & Codebase

Blog System & CMS Integration

Performance & SEO

Developer Documentation

By transitioning to Strapi for content management and integrating Next.js for static site generation, we’ve created a high performance, SEO optimized blog system that’s easy to manage and scale. The site is now faster, more user friendly, and more search engine visible, making it a valuable asset for VerzNexus’ online presence.

This structure ensures that VerzNexus can continue to grow its blog with minimal technical debt, keeping content creators focused on creating high quality content without worrying about the technical details.