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Axoryte
Axoryte

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We rebuilt our client's old PHP site in Next.js — here's what happened to their traffic

A few months ago, one of our clients came to us with a problem. Their
website was built in 2018 on a custom PHP stack. It was slow (4+ second
load time), not mobile-friendly, and their bounce rate was sitting around 78%.

They weren't getting leads from the site. People were just leaving.

We're Axoryte Infosoft — a software development team based in India.
We work with startups and businesses across the US and UK. This particular
client runs a B2B services company in Canada.

What We Did

We rebuilt their entire site in Next.js 14 with the App Router.
Here's the stack we used:

  • Framework: Next.js 14 (App Router)
  • Styling: Tailwind CSS
  • CMS: Sanity.io
  • Hosting: Vercel
  • Analytics: Google Analytics 4 + Vercel Analytics

The old site had no image optimization, no lazy loading, and was serving
everything from a single shared hosting server.

The Results (After 8 Weeks)

Metric Before After
Page Load Time 4.2s 0.9s
Google PageSpeed Score 34 94
Bounce Rate 78% 41%
Monthly Leads 3–4 18–22

The client was genuinely surprised. They said they'd been told their
old site was "fine" for years.

Key Lessons

1. Server-side rendering matters for SEO.
The old site was fully client-rendered. Google was indexing blank pages.
With Next.js SSR, all pages are fully rendered HTML — Google loves it.

2. Image optimization alone can cut 60% of load time.
We switched all images to Next.js <Image> with AVIF format.
That one change reduced page weight by 1.8MB.

3. Core Web Vitals are not optional anymore.
Google now uses LCP, FID, and CLS as ranking factors. You can't ignore them.

What We Learned

Rebuilding a site is never just "a new design." It's a chance to fix
architecture mistakes, improve performance, and set the client up for
the next 5 years.

If you're working on something similar or want to talk about a project,
feel free to reach out through axoryteinfosoft.com.

We're always happy to discuss ideas — no sales pitch, just an honest conversation.

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