Six months ago I launched WellWired, a free AI education platform for adults over 50. Today it has 337 pages: 53 blog posts, 274 glossary terms, and 10 course modules. No CMS. No full-time staff. Just Next.js 16, Tailwind, and Vercel.
Here is what I learned building it.
The Stack
- Framework: Next.js 16 with App Router
- Styling: Tailwind CSS v4
- Hosting: Vercel (free tier got us surprisingly far)
- Payments: Stripe
- Testing: 797 automated tests + Lighthouse CI
- Database: Neon PostgreSQL
No headless CMS. Every page is a React component. The glossary, blog, and course modules all live in the codebase.
Why No CMS?
Three reasons.
Speed. Static generation means every page loads in under a second. No database queries on render. No API calls. Just HTML served from the edge.
Testing. With 797 tests running on every deploy, nothing ships broken. A CMS would mean content changes bypass the test suite. That felt risky for an education platform where accuracy matters.
Cost. Headless CMS pricing gets expensive fast when you have 337 pages. Our entire infrastructure cost is under 20 dollars a month.
The Testing Setup
Every pull request runs:
- Unit tests for all utility functions
- Integration tests for page rendering
- Lighthouse CI with hard gates: accessibility score must be 90+, SEO score must be 90+
- Build verification (if it does not build, it does not ship)
This catches problems before they reach production. We have never shipped a broken page.
What I Would Do Differently
Start with fewer pages. We launched with 200+ glossary terms. Most of them get zero traffic. I should have started with 50 high-value terms and added more based on search data.
Add search earlier. With 337 pages, navigation matters. We added search too late.
Invest in ISR sooner. Some pages need fresh data. Incremental Static Regeneration would have saved us from full rebuilds.
The Numbers
- 337 pages live
- 797 automated tests
- Under 1 second page load
- 20 million potential users in the UK (adults 55+)
- Zero CMS vendor lock-in
If you are building a content-heavy site and wondering whether you need a CMS, the answer might be no. A well-structured Next.js project with good testing can scale further than you think.
WellWired is a free AI education platform for adults over 50. We teach AI in plain English, no jargon, no prerequisites.
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