Northlake Consulting
A 12-year-old Drupal site, rebuilt on Next.js. Load time dropped from 8s to 0.9s. Organic traffic up 140% in six months.
The challenge
Northlake’s existing site was a 12-year-old Drupal 7 install on shared hosting. It took 8 seconds to load on 3G, ranked on page 4 for its primary keyword, and the marketing team couldn’t edit it without filing a developer ticket.
Our approach
We rebuilt on Next.js with Payload CMS for content management. Chose Postgres over MongoDB for transactional integrity and familiarity with the client’s existing data team. Migrated all 400 existing blog posts with 301 redirects on every URL to preserve link equity. Shipped a block-based CMS so marketing can build and edit pages without us.
Outcome
Load time: 8.1s → 0.9s. Organic sessions: +140% in the first six months. Conversion rate from organic traffic: +62%. The marketing team now publishes without tickets — we track on average 2.3 edits per week by their team.
“They actually explained the trade-offs in plain language. We understood why we were picking Next.js over WordPress, not just that we were.”