Case study · September 2026
Same kitchen, same WooCommerce back end, same Borica payments. New front end: server-rendered Next.js in the Garden design, with a plan chooser, per-dish photos, full SEO coverage and every old link kept alive.
Headless Next.js over WooCommerce · Borica payments · Docker + Caddy
Before / after
Desktop, 1440 px. Left: the live WordPress site with its clip-art hero. Right: the new site, with the food above the fold, the "cooking today" card and the little foodies.
Page by page
Switch between desktop and phone. The phone frames scroll: they are full-page captures from the Lighthouse runs at 412 px.
Old: category cards are PNGs with the text baked in. New: real cards with age, meals and price, and a three-question chooser on top.
| Old | New | |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse performance | 56 | 91 |
| First paint | 5.0 s | 0.9 s |
| Largest paint | 18.5 s | 3.4 s |
| Transferred | 3.2 MB | 577 KB |
Old: last week’s Thursday next to next week’s Monday in one flat list. New: week picker, five day cards with cycling dish photos, expired days hidden, order deadline shown.
| Old | New | |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse performance | 60 | 90 |
| First paint | 4.0 s | 0.9 s |
| Largest paint | 11.4 s | 3.6 s |
| Transferred | 3.9 MB | 699 KB |
Old: URL-encoded Cyrillic slug that changes weekly, one collage photo. New: stable numeric URL, dish list, ingredients and allergens, the order deadline, and a share card cropped to the main dish.
| Old | New | |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse performance | 61 | 87 |
| First paint | 2.7 s | 0.9 s |
| Largest paint | 23.8 s | 4.1 s |
| Transferred | 4.1 MB | 450 KB |
Design choices
The original Garden design stays the default. Because the rebuild keeps content and look apart, the same menus, prices, dish of the day and order flow can also wear a different design. These three are extra options the owner can choose instead – each built and running on staging, not a mock-up.
Speed
Lighthouse 13, 24 September 2026. The old site was measured live over the internet; the new site as its production build, so its server time is excluded (the staging server answers in 56 to 215 ms).
Old WordPress site New site
Experience
Age, then how many full solid-food meals a day, then texture, soup, vegetarian, salt or dessert. It picks one of the 13 plans. The meals-per-day rule comes from the founder’s own experience as a customer.
Five day cards with coloured day bubbles, the weekly and monthly subscription beside them, expired days hidden, and the 13:00 order deadline on every card.
Each dish is cropped from the kitchen’s collage. The box edges are measured per photo, so crops stay exact when the layout shifts.
32 sticker characters and 20 food photos, all generated from prompts kept in the repository, in one style: dark-green line, cream linen.
13 categories, 201 products, 13 blog posts and every legal page redirect or render on the new domain, Cyrillic slugs included.
Products, prices, orders and the blog are still edited in WooCommerce. The site re-renders within five minutes.
Search and sharing
| Signal | Old site | New site |
|---|---|---|
| Canonical URL | Home only | Every page |
| Share image | One 851×315 template for the whole site | Generated 1200×630 card per page: plan photo, main dish, blog image |
| Structured data | 1 organisation block | 12 types: Organization, FoodEstablishment, WebSite, OfferCatalog, ItemList, Product, Blog, BlogPosting, FAQPage, AboutPage, ContactPage, breadcrumbs |
| Headings and alt text | No h1 on the home page; text baked into PNGs | One h1 per page, real text, alt text on plan, blog and hero images |
| Sitemap and feeds | Product sitemap churns weekly | Static pages, plans with images, posts with lastmod, legal pages; RSS feed; web manifest and icons |
| Index hygiene | Expired products indexable | Cart, checkout, 404 and expired products are noindex |
| Marketing tags | 5 fire before consent | None; consent-gated hook available |
| Lighthouse SEO / accessibility | 92–100 / 93–94 | 100 / 96–97 |
Scorecard
| Dimension | Old | New | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed on mobile | Lighthouse 56–61 | Lighthouse 87–91 | Solved |
| Server response | 2.6–3.3 s uncached PHP | 56–215 ms from cache | Solved |
| Page weight | 3.2–4.1 MB, 132–158 requests | 450–699 KB, 35–44 requests | Solved |
| Finding the right plan | FAQ paragraph, flat list of 286 products | Chooser, plan pages grouped by week | Solved |
| Dish photography | One collage per day | Per-dish crops, full-size gallery | Solved |
| Brand and illustration | Emoji icons, Canva assets | Garden design, 32 stickers, original jar logo | Solved |
| SEO and structured data | Titles only | Full coverage, 12 schema types | Solved |
| Legacy URLs | — | Every old URL resolves | Solved |
| Checkout | WooCommerce form + expiry plugin | One-page checkout, Borica redirect | One live payment to verify |
| Hosting | Shared LiteSpeed | Docker + Caddy on a VPS, one-command deploy | Domain switch pending |
Lighthouse 13 with the mobile preset and simulated slow 4G on 24 September 2026. Old pages: the live site. New pages: the production build on a local server, so its server time is excluded; the staging server’s time to first byte was measured separately in Chrome (56 ms home, 215 ms plan page). Page sizes and tag counts are from the raw HTML. Screenshots: headless Chrome at 1440×900 and Lighthouse full-page captures at 412 px.
Say hello
Send us your website address. We reply within one business day with a first look at its speed and SEO, and a fixed price for the rebuild – €3,000 to €5,000, with your new site ready in 3–5 days.
No obligation, no sales pressure. You talk to a project lead, not a sales team.